Religion; Philosophy

Carleton University

List of Figures

Carleton University

I Origins, Existence, Cosmos

1. The Great Treatise of the Yijing [+–]

Joseph A. Adler

Kenyon College

Joseph A. Adler is Professor Emeritus of Asian Studies and Religious Studies, Kenyon College.

The Yijing (Book of Changes), originally an ancient Chinese divination text, is considered the first and most profound of the so-called Confucian classics. Between roughly the 5th and 2nd centuries BCE a collection of separate texts became associated with the Book of Changes, some of them being commentaries and some separate treatises. The most important of these appendices, in terms of both its philosophical richness and its influence on the history of Chinese thought, is called the Xici zhuan (Treatise on the Appended Remarks) or the Da zhuan (Great Treatise). The treatise, which is divided into two parts, is a collection of statements by multiple unknown authors about the Book of Changes as a whole and how it functions as both an oracle and a representation of the most fundamental natural and moral principles. It is tantamount to a metaphysics of change—both ordered change (yin-yang alternation) and unordered change (the randomness at the heart of the divination process). The excerpts in this entry is a selection from the Great Treatise of some of the most influential passages concerning cosmology.

2. Dao as the Origin [+–]

Robert A. Carleo III

East China Normal University

Robert Carleo is Lecturer in Chinese Philosophy, East China Normal University.

A core concept of early Chinese philosophy is Dao or the “Way.” This is true for both of its major traditions of thought, Confucianism and Daoism, which conceive of Dao in various and philosophically distinct ways. That is to say, it is not a term with definite meaning. Dao as the Origin (Daoyuan) propounds a specifically Daoist conception of Dao—one originated in the Laozi (also known as the Daodejing) and developed in the lineage known as Huang-Lao thought. This ancient lineage integrates the pragmatic politics of the Yellow Emperor (Huangdi) with the metaphysical and conceptual insights of the Laozi. It went on to become one of the most impactful ideologies of its time, evolving further into the Legalist thinking under which China was unified in the third century BCE. The core metaphysics of this lineage of thinking, centering on its conception of the indescribable Dao, which is prior to and supports all being, is the focus of this translation presented here.

3. Nāgārjuna: Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way – Tsongkhapa: Ocean of Reasoning [+–]

Jay L. Garfield

Smith College

Jay L. Garfield is Professor of Philosophy and Buddhist Studies, Smith College.

Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way is Nāgārjuna’s most important and best known work. Translated here is this work’s’ 24 th chapter called Examination of the Four Noble Truths. This chapter is the locus classicus for Nāgārjuna’s account of the two truths. The first six verses of this chapter are in the voice of an opponent who Nāgārjuna imagines objecting to his analysis on the grounds that the claim that all of these phenomena are empty undermines all of Buddhist doctrine which is encapsulated here in the fundamental tenets of Buddhism, namely the four noble truths taught by the Buddha. These four noble truths are the theses that all of existence is characterized by suffering; that suffering is cause by attraction and aversion grounded in primal confusion; that when those causes are eradicated, suffering ceases; and that this eradication can take place by following the eightfold path. In the remainder of the 40 verses in the 24th chapter of Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way, Nāgārjuna artfully turns the table on this imagined opponent, arguing that it is the view that things are non-empty that undermines the four noble truths, and that the only way to make sense of those truths is by accepting the doctrine of universal emptiness and the identity of the two truths. Selections from Tsongkhapa’s important Tibetan commentary upon this text are also featured here in translation.

4. Āryadeva: Treatise on the Division of Parts [+–]

Jan Westerhoff

University of Oxford

Jan Westerhoff is Professor of Buddhist Philosophy, University of Oxford.

The short Indian work translated and annotated here is traditionally attributed to Āryadeva. Composed in verse and accompanied by a prose commentary, the Treatise on the Division of Parts provides a very concise discussion of several ideas central to the Madhyamaka school of Mahāyāna Buddhism.

5. Śaṅkara: The Commentary on the Aphorisms of Brahman [+–]

Swami Gambhirananda,Swami Medhananda

Swami Gambhirananda was a renowned scholar of Hindu philosophy.

Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education

Swami Medhananda is Senior Research Fellow, Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education.

The Aphorisms on Brahman, likely composed some time between 300 BCE and 400 CE, consists of 555 aphorisms (sūtras) divided into four chapters (adhyāyas). These chapters are divided into four sections (pādas), each of which contains numerous aphorisms. The aim of the text is to systematize and defend the teachings of the Upaniṣads by reconciling apparently contradictory statements in the Upaniṣads and refuting the rival views of schools such as Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, Buddhism, and Jainism. The aphorisms in Aphorisms on Brahman are laconic in the extreme and often lack essential words and information. As a result, various Vedāntic commentators have interpreted many of these aphorisms in divergent ways. In this excerpt from Śaṅkara’s lengthy commentary on the Aphorisms on Brahman, we will see how Śaṅkara attempts to prove that the aphorisms support the tenets of Advaita Vedānta concerning topics pertaining to the prerequisites for deliberating on Brahman, the true nature of the self, the relationship between reason and scripture, and the ontological status of the world and the personal God.

6. Zhang Junfang: The Discourse on Primordial Energy [+–]

Livia Kohn

Boston University

Livia Kohn is Professor Emerita of Religion and East Asian Studies, Boston University.

The Discourse on Primordial Energy (Yuanqi lun) is an essay in chapter 56 of the encyclopedia Seven Tablets in a Cloudy Satchel (Yunji qiqian), which was compiled upon imperial order in the early 11 th century CE. It discusses the nature of the universe in terms of primordial energy (yuanqi), presenting the process of cosmic unfolding and the configuration of the human being, integrating various strands of Daoist and traditional Chinese teachings. Thus, it outlines a series of stages of cosmic unfolding, all described as “great,” during which the universe moves from overarching chaos through vibrating and vacillating energies to more concrete and tangible reality.

7. Avicenna: The Healing [+–]

Davlat Dadikhuda

PhD candidate, LMU Munich

Davlat Dadikhuda is a PhD candidate in Islamic Philosophy, LMU Munich.

This entry contains a complete translation of Avicenna’s Healing I.5, in which he aims is to provide an explication of some of the main conceptual principles of the science of metaphysics. These principles are the notions of existence and thing or quiddity, as well as the modalities of necessity, possibility, and impossibility. In clarifying these notions, Avicenna argues, among other things, that all of them are semantically primitive and epistemically primary.

8. Zhou Dunyi: Explanation of the Diagram of the Great Ultimate [+–]

Bryan Van Norden,Justin Tiwald

Vassar College

Bryan Van Norden is James Monroe Taylor Chair in Philosophy, Vassar College.

University of Hong Kong

Justin Tiwald is Professor of Philosophy, University of Hong Kong.

This piece presents a translation of a foundational text and diagram in Neo-Confucian cosmology and metaphysics entitled the Explanation of the Diagram of the Great Ultimate by Zhōu Dūnyí (1017–1073 CE).

9. Cao Wenyi: The Song of the Ultimate Source of the Great Dao [+–]

Robin R. Wang

Loyola Marymount University

Robin Wang is Professor of Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University.

This entry presents a translation, for the first time in English, of the first undisputable female Daoist work, namely The Song of Ultimate Source of Great Dao by the female philosopher Cao Wenyi (d. 1119 CE). The text seeks to inspire readers to return to the great source of life and to achieve awareness and illumination.

10. Maimonides: The Guide of the Perplexed – Asher Crescas, Efodi, and Shem Tov: Commentaries on The Guide of the Perplexed [+–]

The University of Chicago Divinity School

James T. Robinson is Dean and Caroline E. Haskell Professor, The University of Chicago Divinity School.

This entry offers passages Maimonides’s famous Guide of the Perplexed on Jacob’s vision of a ladder (Genesis 28:12–13). These passages provide us with an excellent example of how Maimonides trained his reader in the philosophical-allegorical exegesis of scripture, and how he separated his own discussion into different chapters, which often present different doctrines and interpretations for different purposes. In total, Jacob’s ladder is discussed in three separate sections of the Guide, each of which seem to put forth a different interpretations. These three sections from the Guide featured in this entry are accompanied by a selection of medieval Jewish commentaries, demonstrating how these works made sense of and decoded the secrets of the Guide. These commentaries represent some of the most influential commentaries upon the Guide written in Hebrew, namely that of Asher Crescas (14th –15th centuries), a relatively unknown commentator of obscure context; Efodi (d. ca. 1411), a polymath member of the circle of Hasdai Crescas; Shem Tov b. Joseph b. Shem Tov (fl. In late fifteenth century Spain), a scion of a distinguished Sefardic family, whose commentary on the Guide often incorporates earlier commentarial views in order to subtly revise or subvert them.

11. Ibn al-Fāriḍ: The Versification of the Wayfaring – Saʿīd al-Dīn Farghānī: The Final End of the Perceptual Tools [+–]

William C. Chittick

Stony Brook University

William C. Chittick is SUNY Distinguished Professor, Stony Brook University.

This entry presents excerpts from a classic Arabic poem on Sufi metaphysics along with a well-known technical commentary upon it by a leading representative of the School of Ibn ʿArabī.

12. Mullā Ṣadrā: The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations and The Four Noetic Journeys – ʿAbd Allāh Javādī Āmulī: The Sealed Wine [+–]

Muhammad U. Faruque

University of Cincinnati

Muhammad U. Faruque is Inayat Malik Assistant Professor of Islamic and Cross-Cultural Philosophy, University of Cincinnati.

Mullā Ṣadrā is credited with introducing an existentialist revolution in Islamic philosophy, arguing that existence (wujūd) is the sole basis of reality and that the entire cosmos and its contents are nothing but varying levels of intensity of the self-same wujūd. Translated here are several of the more important passages from two of Ṣadrā’s key works—The Book of Metaphysical Penetrations and The Four Noetic Journeys—in which he lays out the fundamentals of his ontology. These texts are then followed by an excerpt from a monumental commentary upon The Four Noetic Journeys by the major contemporary Persian philosopher ʿAbd Allāh Jawādī Āmulī (b. 1933).

13. Liu Zhi: Nature and Principle in Islam [+–]

Sachiko Murata

Sachiko Murata is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, Stony Brook University. Her publications include The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought (State University of New York Press, 1992).

This piece presents a translation and a diagram from a Chinese Sufi metaphysical text by Liu Zhi, one of the main authors of the Han Kitab. The work in question is entitled Nature and Principle in Islam and was published in 1704 CE. In the diagram presented here, Liu Zhi outlines the origin of the manifestation of both the macrocosm and microcosm, as well as their return to it.

14. René Guénon: The Multiple States of Being [+–]

Gregory Vandamme

Université catholique de Louvain

Gregory Vandamme is Research Fellow in Islamic Thought at Fonds de la recherche
scientifique (FNRS) and Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain).

René Guénon (d. 1951 CE) was a French metaphysician who exerted a profound influence on the dissemination in the West of metaphysical principles derived from the great spiritual and intellectual traditions of the East. Among the heritages from which Guénon draws abundantly in order to formulate his doctrinal synthesis is that of Advaita Vedanta (as formulated by Shankara), to whose technical vocabulary and conceptual categories he regularly takes resource. At the same time, Guénon himself would become personally involved with the Islamic tradition of Sufism, and in particular the school of Ibn ʿArabī. The major philosophical interest of Guénon’s work lies in his ability to translate the perspective of traditional metaphysics into a language accessible to contemporary readers, while also pointing up its distinctive differences with concepts and systems derived from Western philosophy. The text presented here, wherein Guénon proposes a philosophical justification for human freedom, represents the final chapter of his important work in ontology The Multiple States of Being. Our author addresses freedom at the metaphysical level, basing it on the articulation between “Being”—which for Guénon designates manifested being, or existence—and “non-being”—which designates unmanifested being, or the potentiality of existence. The text also responds to various modern theories of freedom, such as those of Descartes and Bergson.

15. Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine [+–]

Swami Medhananda

Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education

Swami Medhananda is Senior Research Fellow, Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education.

The Indian mystic and philosopher Sri Aurobindo (d. 1950 CE) developed a highly original philosophy of Advaita nondualism on the basis of the Vedic and Vedāntic scriptures as well as his own varied spiritual experiences. According to his Advaita philosophy, the sole reality is Saccidānanda (Being/Consciousness-Force/Bliss), which is both personal (saguṇa) and impersonal (nirguṇa): the Sat aspect of Saccidānanda corresponds to the impersonal Absolute accepted by traditional Advaita Vedāntins like Śaṅkara, while the Cit aspect of Saccidānanda is a personal and dynamic “Consciousness-Force” that has the inherent capacity to manifest in and as the world. Hence, Aurobindo, unlike Śaṅkara, holds that everything in the world is a real manifestation of Divine Consciousness. In the following excerpts from his philosophical magnum opus The Life Divine (1940), Aurobindo explains his highly original views on consciousness.

16. Thomas Yellowtail: Acbadadea, The Maker of All Things Above [+–]

Michael Fitzgerald holds a doctorate of jurisprudence from Indiana University.

This entry contains a description of the Supreme Reality as taught by the Medicine Man and Sun Dance chief Thomas Yellowtail (d. 1993 CE), who was one of the most admired American Indian spiritual leaders of the last century.

II Knowledge, Language, Logic

17. Xunzi: Xunzi [+–]

Winnie Sung

Nanyang Technological University

Winnie Sung is Associate Professor of Confucian Philosophy, Nanyang Technological University.

Xunzi (d. ca. 215BCE) was born in the state of Zhao in ancient China, somewhere around the present-day Hebei or Shanxi provinces. Widely regarded alongside Confucius and Mencius as one of the most important thinkers in the Confucian tradition, he is said to have pursued his studies at the Jixia Academy in the state of Qi. There he was exposed to rigorous intellectual exchanges between thinkers from different persuasions. Xunzi is believed to be the main author of the text bearing his name, Xunzi, with some parts edited by his students. Although Xunzi proclaimed himself to be a follower of Confucius’s teaching and defended key elements of the Confucian tradition in his work, he harshly criticized Mencius’s view that human nature is good. Xunzi argues that human nature is bad and, if followed, will lead to disorder. Xunzi suggests that the heart/mind naturally prefers what benefits the self. Since following the heart/mind will lead to social disorder, education is essential to teaching the Way to the heart/mind. It is only when the heart/mind makes decisions that are in accordance with the Way that there will be order.

18. Īśvarakṛṣṇa: Verses on Enumeration [+–]

Mikel Burley

University of Leeds

Mikel Burley is Associate Professor of Religion and Philosophy, University of Leeds.

The Sāṃkhyakārikā (Verses on Enumeration) of Īśvarakṛṣṇa (c. 350–450 CE) is the oldest surviving systematic articulation of the Sāṃkhya school of Indian philosophy, the founder of which is traditionally said to be the sage Kapila. Expounded in the text is a system of basic factors or principles, which together constitute everything that must be known and differentiated if liberation from suffering is to be achieved. Central to the system is a fundamental distinction between Nature and the true person or Self. Nature is the source both of the capacities that enable anything to be experienced and of the constitutive material of experience, comprising modes of sensory content and perceptible elements. Each living being has—or is—a Self; hence there are multiple Selves, even though each of them is, in essence, pure inactive consciousness. When a Self is in “conjunction” with Nature, the threefold structure of the latter becomes active, generating the world of experience. By coming to discern the difference between the Self and Nature, the goal of spiritual liberation is realized, consisting in the “aloneness” of the Self. The present translation includes most of the Verses on Enumeration, along with explanatory comments by the translator.

19. Al-Fārābī: The Book of Letters [+–]

Rosabel Ansari

Stony Brook University

Rosabel Ansari is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University.

This entry concerns the Islamic philosopher Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī’s (d. 950 CE) theory of “substance” and its Aristotelian legacy. The theory of “substance” concerns what is most properly or primarily a “being,” which Fārābī firstly identifies as “the thing that can be pointed to,” rendered idiomatically here as “the this-something,” and secondly as the intelligible of the this-something in the soul. The emphasis on objects of sensible designation indicates that ontology is first and foremost an exploration of what there is in the world, beginning with the objects of sense perception, even as Fārābī emphatically rejects a purely materialist theory of substance in favor of hylomorphism. Elliptically, however, he ultimately introduces the possibility of another substance, beyond the categories of being, that is not only not in a subject, but is also not the subject for anything else. The literal meaning of the Arabic term for “substance” (jawhar) is “jewel,” yet it was used in medieval Arabic philosophy to designate the Aristotelian ousia (traditionally rendered in English as “substance”). Fārābī extensively discusses how the popular meaning was transferred to the technical meaning, exemplifying a rich interface between his philosophy of language and metaphysics.

20. Prabhācandra: The Sun that Makes the Lotus of the Object of Knowledge Blossom [+–]

Marie-Hélène Gorisse

University of Birmingham

Marie-Hélène Gorisse is Assistant Professor and Endowed Chair of Jain Studies at the University of Birmingham.

This chapter introduces the doctrine of perspectives (nayavāda) developed by Jain philosophers. Trying to make sense within a single coherent metaphysical system of the fact that what exists is at the same time persistent and subject to change is the old problem of the articulation of the one and the many. The solution that Jain philosophers brought to this issue, notably with their doctrine of perspectives, is their most celebrated contribution to South Asian philosophy. Jain philosophers claim that the object of knowledge is infinitely complex. The doctrine of perspectives provides an exhaustive classification of the relevant types of attention through which one considers this object, from the most inclusive to the most particular perspective. Building on this, they then came to explain the resisting divergences between the different philosophical systems as resulting from an initial choice of different epistemic perspectives. This chapter focuses on this doctrine as it was developed by the Jain author Prabhācandra (d. 1065 CE) in his Sun that Makes the Lotus of the Object of Knowledge Blossom (Prameyakamalamārtaṇḍa), an epistemological work that constituted a milestone for later authors as it provided an insightful account of the key inter-doctrinal philosophical issues of his age.

21. Nāṣir-i Khusraw: The Traveler’s Provision [+–]

Khalil Andani

Augustana College

Khalil Andani is Assistant Professor of Religion, Augustana College.

In the seventeenth chapter of his Traveler’s Provisions, the Ismaili philosopher Nasir-i Khusraw presents an original theo-cosmological understanding of God’s Speech and God’s Writing by way of analogy with human speech and writing. Speech and writing each serve a different epistemic context: speech is a form of communication tailored to those present with the speaker while writing is for those people who are absent from the speaker. In Khusraw’s Ismaili Muslim Neoplatonic worldview, God’s cosmic Writing is the primary medium of divine guidance for human beings; this Divine Writing is the intelligible content of the Universal Intellect and Universal Soul, which are the two highest eternal creations of God and the proximate principles of the spiritual and material worlds. To support this claim, Khusraw observes that speech is a communication medium for those spatially and temporally present with the speaker while writing is more appropriate for those who are absent from him. By analogy, Khusraw reasons that God must communicate with human beings through writing and not through direct speech because humans are not temporally or spatially present with God.

22. Al-Ghazālī: The Intentions of the Philosophers – Moses Narboni: Commentary on The Intentions of the Philosophers [+–]

Yonatan Shemesh

Yale University

Yonatan Shemesh is Postdoctoral Associate in Jewish Thought at Yale University.

The Sufi theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 1111 CE) played a major role in the history of Islamic philosophy. Among his most influential works is Tahāfut al-falāsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers), which is a methodical refutation of twenty doctrines of Neo-Platonized Aristotelian Islamic philosophy, mainly those upheld by Avicenna. Yet al-Ghazālī rejected only certain doctrines, not Aristotelian philosophy as a whole. In fact, this great critic of philosophy was a major popularizer of philosophy as well. Another important work in this regard is his Maqāṣid al-falāsifa (The Intentions of the Philosophers), which is a concise summary of Avicenna’s logic, metaphysics, and physics. Al-Ghazālī presents the Intentions as a kind of preparation for the Incoherence, but as an independent work it became a popular philosophical textbook in the Middle Ages, particularly in Christian Europe, where it was studied in Latin and Hebrew translations. The Intentions was especially popular among Jews in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. There were two or three Hebrew translations and several Hebrew commentaries. The most influential commentary was written by Moses Narboni (d. ca. 1362) upon an anonymous Hebrew translation. The following excerpt is a translation of al-Ghazālī’s introduction to the first treatise of the Intentions, which is on logic. The translation is made from the anonymous Hebrew translation that contains Narboni’s commentary.

23. ʿAyn al-Quḍāt: The Essence of Reality [+–]

Carleton University

The Essence of Reality is the first full-out philosophical exposition of mysticism in the Islamic intellectual tradition. It contains remarkably lucid explanations of the problem of the eternity of the world, how existence is in a constant state of flux, and how God is with things but that nothing is with God. All of these discussions are seamlessly tied into ʿAyn al-Quḍāt’s most important argument, namely that the knowledge of the Sufi mystic stands beyond conventional rational knowledge, and is the result of “tasting” (dhawq). In the chapters translated here, ʿAyn al-Quḍāt encourages his readers to reflect on mirrors, since this practice will readily reveal to them the actual situation of the cosmos: that all things, like forms in mirrors, have a certain kind of reality to them, but are fundamentally unreal, and this because everything other than God is impermanent. For those who awaken to this truth, ʿAyn al-Quḍāt argues, they can even see the forms that stand outside of mirrors, along with their own selves, as ultimately evanescent and transitory.

24. Rāmānujācārya: The Essence of the System: Book on Language [+–]

Elisa Freschi

University of Toronto

Elisa Freschi is Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto.

A key problem in Sanskrit philosophy of language has to do with the nature of the signifying element in a sentence. That is, are words that make up a sentence able to convey meanings, or is this exclusively reserved for whole sentences, or perhaps something beyond sentences? Mīmāṃsā authors formulate two main theories to address this problem. The first is the theory of the “Connection of already-expressed word-meanings” (abhihitānvaya), according to which words designate their meanings which then are connected to the sentence meaning. The second is the theory of the “Expression of a connected sentence-meaning (anvitābhidhāna),” which entails that words first connect with one another and then, once connected, communicate the sentence meaning. These theories were first formulated by Kumārila Bhaṭṭa and Prabhākara Miśra (ca. 7th century CE) respectively, who were the main authors of the Mīmāṃsā school. Both rely on three factors for their understanding of the sentence’s meaning. These factors are proximity (isolated word-meanings do not make a sentence-meaning, nor can one make a sentence out of words uttered at different times), (2) semantic fitness (only meanings that are semantically fit can be connected into a sentence meaning), and (3) syntactic expectancy (the expectation of a verb for its complements and vice versa).

25. Shihāb al-Dīn Suhrawardī: The Philosophy of Illumination [+–]

Jari Kaukua

University of Jyväskylä

Jari Kaukua is Professor of Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä.

The following are excerpts from The Philosophy of Illumination (Ḥikmat al-ishrāq) by Shihāb al-Dīn al-Suhrawardī (d. 1191 CE). The book is divided into two parts, the first of which is a concise but rich critique of Avicennian metaphysics and theory of science, whereas the second part sketches out the Illuminationist philosophical system as an alternative to Avicenna’s Peripateticism. In the translated passages, all of which are from the first part of the book, Suhrawardī first aims to undermine the very foundation of Avicenna’s theory of science by taking as his target the concept of real definition. In another set of passages from slightly later on in the book, Suhrawardī targets such foundational ideas of Avicenna’s metaphysics as the real distinction between essence and existence, and the real constitution of essences out of generic and differential features. Instead, he endorses the view that all extramental essences are simple and the analysis into constituents only takes place in the human mind, depending as it does on “intellectual considerations” or concepts that we introduce into our analysis. Thus, Suhrawardī claims, since Avicenna’s metaphysics is based on concepts that fail to adequately correspond to extramental reality, it does not rest on firm grounds.

26. Isaac ibn Latif: Treasures of the King [+–]

The University of Chicago Divinity School

James T. Robinson is Dean and Caroline E. Haskell Professor, The University of Chicago Divinity School.

The selection included here is from Isaac ben Abraham ibn Latif’s Hebrew philosophical work Treasures of the King. Our text contains a somewhat idiosyncratic enumeration of the sciences, following and influenced by such philosophers as Fārābī but recoding the sciences in relation to biblical verses, especially the beginning of Genesis. In his classification, moreover, we see a strong tendency toward the Platonic and Neoplatonic with the author’s emphasis on the importance of mathematics for metaphysics and with the appearance of two doctrines that are common throughout his writings: the “first created being,” which marks the space between the metaphysical and real worlds; and the doctrine of Will, Universal Matter, and Universal Form (building on the Neoplatonism of Isaac Israeli and Solomon ibn Gabirol).

27. Tanḥum ha-Yerushalmi: Introduction to Ecclesiastes [+–]

Raphael Dascalu

Monash University

Raphael Dascalu is Adjunct Research Associate in Jewish Philosophy, Monash University.

Tanḥum b. Joseph ha-Yerushalmi (d. 1291 CE) was an accomplished linguist, biblical exegete, and philosopher. His philosophical system is based primarily on Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037) and Moses Maimonides (d. 1204). Like so many post-Avicennan philosophers, his philosophical writing is deeply informed by Sufi discourse. Philosophical material may be found across his works, among excurses in his biblical commentaries and allegorical interpretations, but first and foremost in the introductions to his commentaries. The present excerpt is from the introduction to his commentary on Ecclesiastes, which begins with a complete classification of the philosophical sciences. Tanḥum’s division of the philosophical sciences most closely mirrors that of Avicenna, although he reverses the hierarchy of physics and mathematics, echoing the classifications of al-Fārābī, Maimonides, and the Brethren of Purity. Tanḥum’s account reaches its climax in its description of “the rank of sanctity,” which entails the contemplation of divine wisdom in the cosmos. According to Tanḥum, this mode of contemplation is the telos of all of the philosophical sciences. Echoing the great Andalusian philosopher Ibn Bājja (d. 1138) and Moses Maimonides, Tanḥum strongly implies his belief in the loss of individual consciousness after death.

28. Jayatīrtha: The Nectar of Logic [+–]

Michael T. Williams

Austrian Academy of Sciences

Michael Williams is Research Associate, Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The text for this entry is taken from Jayatīrtha’s Nyāyasudhā, which was written in the fourteenth century. One of the most important works in the Dvaita tradition of Vedānta, the text gives a critical discussion of most of the major philosophies in India. The entry focuses on Jayatīrtha’s critique of the Cārvāka school, who are often referred to as “materialist” or “atheist” philosophers. These radical thinkers denied the existence of god and a self distinct from the body, along with the efficacy of Vedic ritual practices and the belief in transmigratory existence (saṃsāra). These philosophers sometimes claimed that sense-perception is the only means of knowledge. In this passage Jayatīrtha, an avowed theist, gives a refutation of this view, arguing that the Cārvākas’ theories about sense-perception and inference are incompatible with the practice of philosophical reasoning itself. In the course of his critique, Jayatīrtha delves into the Cārvākas’ theory of self, arguing that sense-perception itself establishes the existence of a self distinct from the body.

29. Charles Eastman: The Great Mystery [+–]

Michael Fitzgerald holds a doctorate of jurisprudence from Indiana University.

This piece outlines the exposition by Charles Eastman (d. 1939 CE), a major Santee Sioux Indian, of the Great Mystery and the human awareness of and comportment towards It.

30. Keiji Nishitani: The Duty of Critique and the Problem of Fascism [+–]

Melanie Coughlin

Carleton University

Melanie Coughlin is Lecturer in Asian Philosophy and Religion, Carleton University.

Nishitani Keiji (d. 1990 CE) addresses a concrete socio-political concern in the wake of the Second World War: how does fascism function epistemically, and what kind of critical practice is required to counteract it? The theme Nishitani uses to investigate this problem is “the soul” (tamashī). During the Second World War, this term for “soul” was one of many Shintōistic elements used to promote imperialist theories of Japanese uniqueness and superiority. Nishitani offers an account of the term that counters these kinds of misuses. The soul, Nishitani argues, is the life of a nation’s people whose self-shaping power requires critical history. Although largely implicit in this essay, Nishitani was strongly influenced during this period by an emphasis on the salvific awareness of one’s own karmic evil in the thought of Shinran Shōnin (d. 1263), the founder of True Pure Land or “Shin” Buddhism. Drawing a method from Nietzsche’s genealogy and an aim from Shinran’s soteriology, Nishitani argues that the method of taking a “scalpel to one’s roots” must above all aim to counteract “one’s own” fascism.

31. Mou Zongsan: Appearances and Things-in-Themselves [+–]

David Elstein

State University of New York, New Paltz

David Elstein is Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York, New Paltz.

Mou Zongsan (d. 1995 CE) is widely recognized as the foremost Chinese philosopher of the twentieth century. His final works were a sustained dialogue with Kant in which he sought to demonstrate that Confucianism surpassed Kant in several respects. Mou felt that Kant failed to give morality a stable foundation. That is, he agreed with Kant that morality requires a free will capable of giving a law to itself. However, for Kant, we can never know that we have free will. Human knowledge is limited to the world of appearances, and in this world, everything functions according to causal laws. We can have no knowledge of a free will outside natural causality. This would require a different kind of awareness, knowledge by intellectual intuition. In this excerpt from Appearances and Things-in-Themselves, Mou argues that humans have a limited form of intellectual intuition. Through moral responses, the intellect can reflect back on itself and become aware of its own freedom and capacity for determining itself. It is a form of intellectual intuition in which we know the mind in itself. Then we can know that we are free and capable of true moral action.

32. Oludamini Ogunnaike: On Africana Philosophy [+–]

Carleton University

Oludamini Ogunnaike (b. 1986) is a Nigerian-born American Associate Professor of African religious thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. Having completed his undergraduate studies in Cognitive Neuroscience and African Studies at Harvard University and earned the distinction of Summa Cum Laude, he went on to do graduate work at Harvard, obtaining his PhD in African Studies and the Study of Religion in 2015. Before taking up his current position at the University of Virginia in 2019, Ogunnaike was a postdoctoral fellow in Islam in Africa at Stanford University and then Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at the College of William and Mary. Ogunnaike is author of several books, one of which, entitled Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions , was awarded a prestigious First Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora. In addition to his numerous publications in the fields of Africana philosophy, Sufi poetry, and Islamic thought are a series of highly creative projects which explore links between philosophy and the creative arts, particularly poetry, fiction, and film. Today, Ogunnaike is widely recognized as a leading voice in a variety of disciplines, from cross-cultural and decolonial philosophy on the one hand, to the Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa on the other. This entry is a transcript of an interview conducted with Professor Ogunnaike in the fall of 2023. It explores Africana philosophy in all of its complexity, and situates it in the emerging field of global philosophy along the way.

III Ethics, Praxis, Aesthetics

33. Confucius: The Analects [+–]

Winnie Sung,Peimin Ni

Nanyang Technological University

Winnie Sung is Associate Professor of Confucian Philosophy, Nanyang Technological University.

Grand Valley State University

Peimin Ni is Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University.

Confucius or Kongzi (d. ca. 479BCE), whose influence on Chinese history and culture is profound, was born in the state of Lu in ancient China, which is located in present-day Shandong Province. It is generally believed that his ancestors belonged to a noble family but that his family had fallen upon hard times during his youth. Confucius had some seventy-two disciples. They left Lu and travelled to different states, only to eventually return to Lu where Confucius spent the rest of his days teaching and editing classical texts. The main source of Confucius’s teachings is the Analects. It is a book of conversations, mainly between Confucius and his disciples, compiled by Confucius’s disciples some sixty or seventy years after Confucius’s death. Ren and li (ritual propriety) are two important concepts in Confucius’s thought. A morally superior person must observe ritual, but ritual is not just the physical performance of certain rites. Underlying ritual propriety is the appropriate attitude, namely ren. Ren is a very complex concept that is difficult to translate into an English word. It is variously translated as “human-heartedness,” “benevolence,” “goodness,” and “humaneness.” Ren is an ethical quality that is characteristic of human beings. To be characterized by ren is to have concern for others.

34. Mencius: The Mencius [+–]

Winnie Sung

Nanyang Technological University

Winnie Sung is Associate Professor of Confucian Philosophy, Nanyang Technological University.

Mengzi or Mencius (d. 312 BCE) was born in the state of Zou in ancient China, which is located in present-day Shandong Province. It is generally believed that Mencius received a good education when he was young. He regarded himself as a transmitter of Confucius’s thought but never studied directly under him (although he probably studied with the disciple of Confucius’s grandson, Zisi). Mencius has always been held in high regard in the Confucian tradition, and is regarded as “the second sage” by later Confucians. Mencius is most well-known for his view that human nature is good. Midway in his life, Mencius accepted some disciples and started traveling to different states, wherein he would advise rulers to practice governance that is characterized by ren 仁 (humaneness). He was normally received with open arms in the states that he had visited, although the rulers of these states often found his ideals difficult to put into practice. In his late age, Mencius returned to his hometown and continued teaching. After Mencius’ death, his disciples and later followers compiled a record of his key sayings and deeds into a single text simply known as the Mencius.

35. The Essential Precepts of Master Redpine [+–]

Livia Kohn

Boston University

Livia Kohn is Professor Emerita of Religion and East Asian Studies, Boston University.

The Essential Precepts of Master Redpine is a classic on the connection of moral behavior and the universe. It goes back to the fourth century CE, but its extant edition dates from the Song dynasty (960–1268 CE). The text is largely free of Buddhist influence and presents a pattern of retribution limited to natural agencies and celestial administration. It presents a dialogue between the Yellow Emperor and Master Redpine, both classical figures in the Daoist tradition described in the Immortals’ Biographies (Liexian zhuan) of the Former Han dynasty. The Yellow Emperor is the classical student, described in ancient texts as learning from various masters; Master Redpine is an inspiring immortal, associated with various dietary and physical practices. The dialogue between them consists of nine questions and answers, revealing how fortune comes about and how to control it.

36. Sun Simiao: On Happiness and Long Life [+–]

Livia Kohn

Boston University

Livia Kohn is Professor Emerita of Religion and East Asian Studies, Boston University.

On Happiness and Long Life is a short treatise on moral behavior and its consequences by the great physician and Daoist Sun Simiao (d. 682 CE). The text presents the workings of life and destiny together with various ways to enhance life. Matching traditional Daoist understanding, the author sees long life as the direct function of the genetic make-up and talents one brings into this world (described as inner nature) in combination with the physical strength, social circumstances, and overall situation in life one receives from heaven, defined as destiny. While inner nature manifests in one’s principle or the inner beacon that guides one’s direction in life, destiny appears concretely in one’s lot, that is, the chances and opportunities one has in life.

37. Patañjali: Yogasūtra [+–]

Christopher Key Chapple

Loyola Marymount University

View Website

Christopher Key Chapple is Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and Director of the Master of Arts in Yoga Studies at Loyola Marymount University. A specialist in the Religions of India, he has published more than fifteen books on Yoga, Jainism, and Buddhism as well as on Asian religions and ecology. He edits the journal Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology (Brill). He serves on the advisory boards for the Ahimsa Center (Pomona), the Center for Jaina Studies (SOAS, London), and the Forum on Religion and Ecology (Yale).

The Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali consists of four chapters that describe the principles and practices of Yoga. It begins with a definition of Yoga: calming the fluctuations of mind. Through Yoga practices such as devotion, recitation of mantra, and reflection on dreams, one can train the mind to become focused and unruffled. Five difficulties or karmic afflictions vitiate the human condition: ignorance of one’s true self, egotism, attraction, repulsion, and craving for experience. By stepping away from identification with these, one can enter a state of stability and stillness. Patañjali prescribes an eightfold Yoga path. The first phase requires the cultivation of nonviolence, truth, honesty, appropriate sexual conduct, and minimization of possessions. The second phase brings about purity, happiness, self-control, studiousness, and devotion. One masters the ability to sit comfortably for a long period of time in the third phase and control over breathing process in the fourth phase, leading one into a state of inwardness, the fifth stage of Yoga. The inner limbs of Yoga include concentration, meditation, and a rarefied, unified state of mind known as samādhi. Mastery of Yoga brings many benefits, including strength, beauty, and freedom. Yoga philosophy and practices can be found in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

38. Śāntideva: How to Lead an Awakened Life – Gyeltsap: Introduction to How to Lead an Awakened Life [+–]

Jay L. Garfield

Smith College

Jay L. Garfield is Professor of Philosophy and Buddhist Studies, Smith College.

Translated here are sections of Śāntideva’s How to Lead an Awakened Life, with portions of Gyeltsap’s commentary. The former is justly renowned as the most significant treatise on ethics in the Mahāyāna Buddhist tradition, and one of the great masterpieces of Buddhist ethical thought and literature tout court. The sixth chapter, on patience, is one of the most popular in the text. The critique of anger is powerful, and the poetic evocations that demonstrate the inappropriateness of anger and the rationality of patience are compelling. In this chapter, Śāntideva argues that anger is irrational as it is grounded in a view of persons as autonomous, causally independent agents who willingly harm one another instead of being causally driven, interdependent individuals who act in ignorance. Anger is also grounded in an unjustifiable egocentricity, and harms both others and oneself. Patience is the antidote to anger and reflects a clearer view of the nature of reality.

39. Abū Bakr al-Rāzī: The Philosophical Way of Life [+–]

Peter Adamson

LMU Munich

Peter Adamson is Professor of Late Ancient and Arabic Philosophy, LMU Munich.

The Philosophical Way of Life is a short text by Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, a doctor and philosopher who lived in Persia and Iraq and died in 925 CE. In this work al-Rāzī responds to unnamed opponents who criticized him for failing to live up to the example of his role model, Socrates. Al-Rāzī responds to his critics by putting forth a hypothesis to reconcile conflicting reports about Socrates: he started out as an uncompromising ascetic but adopted a more moderate lifestyle as he matured. This more moderate lifestyle is the one al-Rāzī adopts for himself. He goes on to provide a theoretical justification for this way of life, and in the process makes interesting remarks on the ethical treatment of animals, members of other religions, and his own literary achievements.

40. Abraham Maimonides: The Worshippers’ Sufficiency [+–]

Raphael Dascalu

Monash University

Raphael Dascalu is Adjunct Research Associate in Jewish Philosophy, Monash University.

Kitāb Kifāyat al-ᶜābidīn (The Worshippers’ Sufficiency) by Abraham Maimonides (d. 1237 CE), son of Moses Maimonides (d. 1204), was a vast legal and ethical compendium, of which only a small portion has survived. In the present excerpt, Abraham Maimonides presents a dichotomy between humility (tawāḍuᶜ) and pride or arrogance (kibr); he further divides humility into inward and outward humility on the one hand, and humility before the Divine and interpersonal humility on the other. Humility is to be acquired through habituation. For example, one must avoid wearing fine clothing, living in luxurious abodes, and pursuing positions of authority. In terms of practices intended to positively cultivate humility, one must train oneself in proper conduct, religious discipline, and scientific contemplation. In elucidating these modes of behaviour, Abraham Maimonides cites scripture extensively, in addition to mounting rational arguments. The present excerpt demonstrates Abraham Maimonides’ dependence on the great mystic and theologian al-Ghazālī, as well as Jewish works such as Kitāb al-Hidāya ilā Farāʾiḍ al-Qulūb (The Book of Guidance to the Duties of the Heart; Hebrew Ḥovot ha-Levavot) by Baḥyā Ibn Paqūdā (d. 1120) and his Moses Maimonides’ legal code (Mishneh Torah).

41. Isaac Ibn Latif: Gate of Heaven [+–]

The University of Chicago Divinity School

James T. Robinson is Dean and Caroline E. Haskell Professor, The University of Chicago Divinity School.

Gate of Heaven by Ibn Latif presents a full religious philosophy, largely keyed to Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed but often critical of it. The text consists of four Gates. The first delves into philosophical issues from a philosophical perspective—from nature of God and creation to the soul, intellect, and immortality. The second gate presents philosophical ideas exegetically, focusing mainly on the “account of the beginning” and “account of the chariot.” The third gate comprises esoteric doctrines, especially cosmic cycles, while the fourth gate, samples from which are translated below, focuses on the reasons for the commandments. Identifying, explaining, and speculating about the reasons for the 613 commandments of rabbinic Judaism developed into a distinct branch of Jewish thought during the Middle Ages, especially after Maimonides devoted a lengthy section of his Guide of the Perplexed to them. Much of the discussion in this tradition related to the question of whether divine law can be rationalized at all, how law relates to ethics (generally in the Aristotelian sense), and to what extent Jewish practices are instrumental (serving the higher end of intellectual perfection), and to what extent they are intrinsically valuable. All of these questions are touched upon in Ibn Latif’s approach to the subject as well—in the way he frames the discussion in relation to Aristotle’s four causes, how he classifies laws in relation to utility or a final aim, and the importance of love and fear in action and divine service. Yet there are some unique contributions as well, especially in our author’s use of the Hellenistic definition of philosophy as imitation of God’s actions to understand the purpose of religious praxis in general.

42. Madhusūdana Sarasvatī: The Elixir of Devotion [+–]

Shankar Nair

University of Virginia

Shankar Nair is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.

What role do love and emotion play within philosophy – particularly non-dualist philosophy? Given non-dualism’s characteristic metaphysical commitment to an ultimately impersonal reality or deity, what space could there be for individual devotion to a personal God? What would that devotion look like – of what character or texture? Such are some of the key questions taken up in the Hindu philosopher Madhusūdana Sarasvatī’s (fl. 16th -early 17th c. CE) Sanskrit composition, the Elixir of Devotion (Bhakti-rasāyana). Writing from the perspective of the Hindu Advaita Vedānta tradition, Madhusūdana offers a creative non-dualist account of the cognitive structure, ontology, and phenomenology of devotion (bhakti), detailing and categorizing the variegated emotions, “flavors,” and ultimate bliss that devotion to the (non-dual) Lord comprises.

43. Charles Eastman: The Moral Code [+–]

Michael Fitzgerald holds a doctorate of jurisprudence from Indiana University.

In this selection, Charles Eastman speaks from direct experience of the moral code that was instilled in him by his people, including his unlettered grandmother who was primarily responsible for his early education.

44. Kim Iryŏp: Meditation and the Attainment of the Mind [+–]

Jin Y. Park

American University

Jin Y. Park is Professor and Chair of Philosophy, Religion at American University.

Kim Iryŏp (d. 1971) was a female Sŏn master and thinker in modern Korea. Kim was her family name and Iryŏp her pen name and dharma name. Before she joined the monastery in 1933, she was known as a writer and an activist in the women’s movement demanding gender equality in Confucian Korean society. Iryŏp’s Buddhist writings, published in the 1960s, are unique for their style and for her combination of personal life stories with Buddhist teachings—what I characterize as “narrative philosophy.” Her Buddhist philosophy demonstrates her lifelong search for freedom, which she discussed in such terms as “great self,” “creativity,” and “culture.” In this piece, Iryŏp emphasizes the importance of meditation, which she describes as a practice of controlling one’s mind. Having been trained in the hwadu meditation of the Sŏn (Chan in Chinese) Buddhist tradition, Iryŏp teaches meditation as a way to overcome habitual energy that constrains one’s capacity to be a free being. Religious practice, for Iryŏp, is not a matter of belonging to a certain organization but of education on becoming an authentic human being, and thus, for our author, meditation is essential to that path.

45. Hilmi Ziya Ülken: Ethics of Love [+–]

Taraneh Wilkinson,Recep Alpyağıl

PhD candidate, University of Cincinnati

Taraneh Wilkinson is a Doctoral Candidate in the Philosophy of Science, University of Cincinnati.

Istanbul University

Recep Alpyağıl is a professor and philosopher of religion at Istanbul University.

Hilmi Ziya Ülken (d. 1974 CE) was a Turkish philosopher influential in shaping academic discussions of philosophy and theology in the early Turkish Republic. This chapter provides a translated excerpt from Hilmi Ziya Ülken’s most famous work, Ethics of Love: A Book for the People in Spite of the People (published in 1931, 1958, and 1971). Meant for a broad audience, the work lays out the ethical implications of living out Ülken’s philosophy of monopluralism. According to Ülken, there are four levels of moral development, the highest of which is manifest in his ethics of love. An ethics of love is distinguished by its simultaneous emphasis on self-sacrifice and authenticity. One who aspires to an ethics of love must exhibit a strong sense of efficacy on the world, grounded in their own authentic passions, what Ülken refers to as love of influence. At the same time, they must learn the art of self-transcendence and ultimate sacrifice. To merge these two seemingly incompatible ends, Ülken points to the Infinite as the driving force and guiding principle of the spirit’s development in the world and in each human person. Ülken's use of the Infinite is informed by religious concepts, including the Islamic concept of Divine Unity (tawhid), as well as ideals from Christianity and other major traditions. According to Ülken, seeing and seeking the Infinite or Divine Unity in all things is precisely what creates space to celebrate the difference and plurality inherent to the finite world, and seeking the Infinite in all things is what it takes to cultivate one’s true humanity.

46. Bābā Ẓahīn Shāh Tājī, Signs of Beauty

Amer Latif

Emerson College

Amer latif is Associate Professor of Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies, Emerson College.

47. Ngaimarish ole Mulo: Wisdom, Conflict Resolution, and Peace [+–]

Gail Presbey,Daniel Sasine

University of Detroit Mercy

Gail Presbey is Professor of Philosophy, University of Detroit Mercy.

Daniel Sasine is a Native Maasai language speaker and a teacher of Swahili in Magadi, Kenya.

Ngaimarish ole Mulo, a Maasai cattle herder of Kenya shares his insights on the topics of wisdom, conflict resolution and peace. He was interviewed as part of an ongoing sage philosophy project. The project was started by H. Odera Oruka, a Philosophy professor at University of Nairobi, who was trying to address the problem of eurocentrism in the philosophy curriculum at African universities by turning to wise elders who had been marginalized by the university system. Drawing from several interviews, Ngaimarish ole Mulo shares his insights on peacemaking. One needs to understand the nature of the parties to a conflict, whether they are youths or older. One needs to think about how to speak to them. He shares his interests in conflicts of all types, from marital strife to clan altercations, from individual acts of murder to international wars. He describes Maasai traditions of peacemaking and reconciliation, including compensation. He also articulates key values and character traits such as humility, sympathy, and respect. He describes God as caring and notes that Maasai words for God such as Enkai and Pasaje are feminine words, denoting God’s feminine nature. The interview was conducted by Gail Presbey with translation by Daniel Sasine.

48. Seyyed Hossein Nasr: The Garden of Truth [+–]

Justin Cancelliere

Justin Cancelliere is an independent scholar focusing on Islamic Philosophy, Sufism, and the Platonic tradition.

In his principal work on Islamic spirituality The Garden of Truth, the prominent contemporary philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr expounds the nature of beauty from the Sufi point of view. Being a divine quality of the most fundamental kind, beauty in its essential reality is neither definable nor communicable for Nasr, although one can indicate and describe it. Central also to his perspective is the inextricability of beauty and truth, which coincide metaphysically in God. Since for Nasr beauty is an objective reality, human receptivity to the reality of beauty, which at the highest level liberates man from the suffocating confines of his own individuality, is not simply a matter of possessing sound sensory faculties; it also requires struggling to purify the soul of its defects, which in turn requires the exercise of one’s discernment. As he explains, the beauty manifested so powerfully in the created order is ambiguous, spiritually speaking, because it can distract and ensnare the soul. But to experience beauty aright is to be reminded of God and even to see Him, for, from the point of view of Sufi metaphysics, there can really only ever be one Beauty.

IV Ultimate Reality, Religion, Scripture

49. Laozi: The Classic of the Way and Potency [+–]

Alexus McLeod

Indiana University

Alexus McLeod is Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University.

Daodejing (Daode jing), also known as the Laozi after the mythical individual traditionally associated with its authorship, is arguably the central and most revered text of the Daoist tradition, dating to around the 4th century BCE. The text deals with topics such as cosmogony and the origins of things, ethics and effective action, politics and rulership, the art of war, knowledge, change and the nature of the world, and methods for achieving a thriving life. Two central concepts of the text are dao, a metaphysical and ethical concept, identified with a transcendent foundation of being, and de, a kind of potency or effectiveness that is a quality of the developed person who understands the world, enabling effective action generally.

50. Akṣapāda Gautama: Nyāya-sūtra – Pakṣilasvāmin Vātsyāyana and Uddyotakara: Commentaries on the Nyāya-sūtra [+–]

Matthew R. Dasti,Stephen Phillips

Bridgewater State University

Matthew R. Dasti is Professor of Philosophy, Bridgewater State University.

University of Texas at Austin

Stephen Phillips is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin.

The Nyāya school is one of the leading traditions of philosophy in classical India. Its early theological reflections are found in the form of commentaries on a portion of its root text, the Nyāya-sūtra (c. 200 CE), by the pioneering thinkers Vātsyāyana (c. 425 CE) and Uddyotakara (c. 550 CE). Vātsyāyana articulates a skeletal notion of a universal creator, akin to the God of natural theology, who also oversees the karmic justice of the creation. Uddyotakara offers a number of proofs for the existence of such a God, focused on the need for intelligent, agential creation behind the structure of the world. These are best understood as arguments from design in a decidedly Hindu context.

51. Sima Chengzhen: The Discourse on Dao and Its Embodiment [+–]

Livia Kohn

Boston University

Livia Kohn is Professor Emerita of Religion and East Asian Studies, Boston University.

The Discourse on Dao and Its Embodiment (Daotilun) is a short scholastic treatise in dialogue format associated with Sima Chengzhen (d. 735 CE), the twelfth patriarch of Highest Clarity (Shangqing) Daoism at its height under Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang. The text focuses on the nature of created existence, described as beings (wu), which are both fully at one with Dao and also individual, independent entities. The relationship is intricate and complex, with Dao bringing forth the underlying blueprint closely related to cosmic chaos (here called “chaos complete”), while Virtue, related to the patterns of yin and yang (here described as the “great symbol”), fills in the particulars, establishing concrete reality—that is, embodying Dao in visible and tangible forms. The Discourse on Dao and Its Embodiment also discusses the role of language and the conscious identification of objects and aspects of reality by speaking of “names.” They are secondary to reality, that is, they form a later part of the embodiment process, but also have creative powers in that they shape the way people look at the world. Names are essential in both the growth of consciousness and its ultimate overcoming in the Daoist cultivation process into a state that is both empty and silent.

52. Saadia Gaon: Commentary on Genesis [+–]

Adi Shiran

PhD candidate, The University of Chicago Divinity School

Adi Shiran is a PhD candidate in Jewish and Islamic Thought, The University of Chicago Divinity School.

The text translated in this chapter is a short excerpt of Saadia Gaon’s (882-942 CE) Judeo-Arabic commentary on Genesis 3. This excerpt focuses on the punishments of Adam, Eve, and the serpent. It is organized in the form of questions and answers, posed by an anonymous adversary and answered by Saadia. One of the major exegetical difficulties with which Saadia deals here is that of theodicy. Innocent beings seem to be punished for the sins of their fathers, the serpent is punished for telling what is, allegedly, the truth, and various other creatures carry the burden of the serpent’s punishments although they were not involved in its mischief. Saadia’s ethical discussion in this excerpt reflects his deep commitment to the Jewish tradition, as well as the influence upon his thought of contemporaneous trends in the Islamicate world.

53. Isaac Ibn Ghiyath: Commentary on Ecclesiastes [+–]

Armando Montoya Jordán,Rafael Augusto Campos García-Calderón

The University of Chicago Divinity School

James T. Robinson is Dean and Caroline E. Haskell Professor, The University of Chicago Divinity School.

Isaac Ibn Ghiyath was a rabbinic leader in Lucena, Andalusia (Islamic Spain), during a golden age of Jewish scholarship in Andalusia. The only extant biblical book he commented on is his Judeo-Arabic translation of and commentary on Ecclesiastes (Qohelet), which was probably the first commentary written on this controversial book by a Rabbinic authority during the Middle Ages. This long commentary is strongly grammatical and also philosophical. This entry contains the first part of Ibn Ghiyath’s introduction to his commentary on Ecclesiastes wherein he presents a theory of language, prophecy, scripture, and tradition which would influence later Jewish scholars in Andalusia and beyond.

54. Ibn Ṭufayl: Living, Son of the Awake [+–]

Taneli Kukkonen

NYU Abu Dhabi

Taneli Kukkonen is Professor of Philosophy, NYU Abu Dhabi.

Living, Son of the Awake is Abū Bakr Ibn Ṭufayl’s (d. 1185 CE) sole surviving philosophical work and one of the best-known texts in classical Arabic philosophy. A philosophical tutorial cast in narrative form, Ḥayy tells the story of a boy who grows up alone on an equatorial island, with no human company or community to shape his thinking. Ḥayy first achieves mastery over his physical surroundings, then reasons his way independently to the teachings of Arabic Aristotelianism. Ḥayy’s story culminates with a series of ecstatic visions that describe the supernal order of reality and the way the Necessary Being’s overflow of existence radiates from its eternal source. In an epilogue from which the translated text is excerpted Ḥayy at last encounters another human being at the age of fifty. What is at stake in the encounter is the relation between rational investigation and personal experience regarding the divine, on the one hand, and on the other the translatability of each of the two with what revealed religion teaches, both theologically and in terms of mandated religious duties. While the translated passage stresses the harmony between what natural reason discloses and what religion teaches, Ḥayy’s eventual encounter with urban civilization ends disappointingly.

55. Rāmānuja: Commentary on the Bhagavadgītā – Veṅkaṭanātha: Shedding Light on the Contextual Meaning of the Bhagavadgītā [+–]

Elisa Freschi

University of Toronto

Elisa Freschi is Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Toronto.

The Bhagavadgītā is a key text of Sanskrit philosophy. All schools of Vedānta commented on it. The Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta school focuses especially on verse 66, called the “Ultimate Verse”. The verse is presented as being uttered by God Himself to Arjuna, and is the center of an elaborate philosophical reflection around soteriology and the autonomy of human action. In this entry, I translate the Ultimate Verse, its commentary by Rāmānuja (12th c. CE), and last extracts of the sub-commentary on Rāmānuja’s commentary by Veṅkaṭanātha (14th c.). This sequence of texts provides one with a golden opportunity to think about the commentarial nature of philosophy in the Sanskrit cosmopolis, where important philosophical points were introduced while commenting upon a previous text. For instance, Veṅkaṭanātha introduces in a soteriological discussion reflections on autonomous action and its impossibility for human beings, as well as the topic of deontics. He explains how an “ought” entails a “can,” discussing the relation between obligations and one’s eligibility with regard to the enjoined acts. The main soteriological teaching in the Ultimate Verse and its commentaries is the idea that salvation is achieved through surrender to God. Surrendering means abandoning one’s ambition to be an autonomous agent and recognizing one’s dependency upon God.

56. Lu Xiangshan: Recorded Sayings [+–]

Philip J. Ivanhoe

Georgetown University

Philip J. Ivanhoe is Professor and Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Georgetown University.

Lu Xiangshan believed the heart-mind (xin) embodies all the pattern-principles (li) that give structure and meaning to the phenomenal world. The heart-mind is the unique site where all pattern-principles can come to consciousness and be known. As he taught, “The universe is my heart-mind. My heart-mind is the universe.” Coming to understand the world is not a process of taking it in or thinking about, it but tallying or matching up the pattern-principles inherent in the heart-mind with the various phenomena of the world. Understanding always involves a personal, introspective dimension: one discovers how things are by coming to see each truth for oneself. This heart-mind is shared by all human beings, and its pattern-principles are the same throughout the universe and across time. When the heart-mind is rightly ordered, it tracks and reveals the very same truths that the greatest sages first discovered. As Lu says, “If one understands the fundamental root or basis, the Six Classics are all one’s footnotes!”

57. Ibn Kammūna: The New Wisdom [+–]

Bakinaz Abdalla

Nile University

Bakinaz Abdalla is Assistant Professor in the School of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Nile University.

Ibn Kammūna (d. 1284 CE), a Jewish philosopher active in Baghdad during the Mongol invasion, made significant contributions to medieval Arabic philosophy. His notable works consist of commentaries on Avicenna and Suhrawardī and several independent treatises on subjects that were widely discussed in his time. This entry offers a translation of the concluding chapter of his primary philosophical work in Arabic (al-Jadīd fī’l-ḥikma), The New Wisdom. In this chapter, Ibn Kammūna explores the nature of evil, grappling with the challenge of reconciling the widespread existence of evil in a world that is governed by an all-good and all-knowing God. Ibn Kammūna’s discussion of this subject, similar to many thinkers of his time, relies heavily on Avicenna’s conception of evil as privation. In the course of his discussion, he provides insights into the intricate details of God’s solicitude for human beings and all creatures.

58. Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī: On Recognizing Real Love [+–]

Noah H. Taj

PhD candidate, Carleton University

Noah H. Taj is a PhD candidate in Carleton University’s Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture.

Dawūd al-Qayṣarī (d. 1350 CE) was the head instructor of the Ottoman Empire’s first madrasa, and played a major role in Ottoman intellectual and spiritual life. He is especially known for the manner in which he was able to systematize the teachings of Ibn ʿArabī and his students. To this day, Qayṣarī’s works in philosophical Sufism are read throughout the Islamic world, particularly in Iran and Turkey. True to the perspective of the school of Ibn ʿArabī, Qayṣarī was concerned with explications of Sufi metaphysics as well as the lived reality of Islamic practice, which is fundamentally oriented towards the relationship between the Divine and the human. Among Qayṣarī’s writings in this regard is his treatise entitled On Recognizing Real Love, a section of which is presented here in translation.

59. Jalāl al-Dīn Dāwānī: The New Treatise on Establishing the Necessary Being [+–]

Davlat Dadikhuda

PhD candidate, LMU Munich

Davlat Dadikhuda is a PhD candidate in Islamic Philosophy, LMU Munich.

Muḥaqqiq Dawani’s New Treatise on Establishing the Necessary Being represents cutting edge philosophical theology in 15 th century Islamic East. In this treatise, Dawānī sets out to make the case divinity. In doing this, he largely follows the Islamic philosophical tradition (ḥikma) in seeking to prove a being intrinsically necessary in its existence that is characterized by various attributes such as simplicity, uniqueness, knowledge, power, volition, and the rest. The first chapter on the New Treatise, arguably the most important, is on establishing that there in fact exists at least one such necessary entity. The argument Dawānī offers, unpacks, and defends against objections, is Avicenna’s famous “demonstration of the truthful,” which can be crisply, though densely, captured in the following line of thought: necessarily, something exists; therefore, something exists necessarily.

60. The Chilam Balam of Chumayel [+–]

Alexus McLeod

Indiana University

Alexus McLeod is Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University.

The Chilam Balam of Chumayel is one of a number of Chilam Balam texts of the Maya of the Yucatán peninsula, named after the semi-mythical “jaguar priest.” These were written in the Maya language in Latin script between the 16th and 18th centuries CE. They include a mix of discussions of history, calendrics, ritual, cosmogonies, medicine, philosophy, and other cultural information, including accounts of the generation of humanity and the characteristic activities of humans, tied to a correlative metaphysical system to contextualize all aspects of the world.

61. Bartolomé Herrera: On the Sovereignty of the Intelligence [+–]

University of Granada

Armando Montoya Jordán is a Doctoral student in Sufi Studies at the University of Granada.

Independent researcher in the field of political theology

Bartolomé Herrera (d. 1864 CE) was a Peruvian Catholic priest, jurist, diplomat, and a strong advocate of political traditionalism with fervent philosophical ideas about the nature of law and politics. He conveyed the concerns of Peruvian Catholic scholasticism—a sort of Catholicism deeply rooted in the tradition of the Spanish Church, particularly in Jesuit theology—against the backdrop of the political and juristic vicissitudes that would configure the formation and subsequent foundation of Peru as a nation-state project inspired by the political ideologies of French republicanism. In this context, Herrera represented the voice of an important sector of Latin American society in the face of the challenges posed by the establishment of bourgeois ideological models in the emerging continent on the one hand, and the subsequent moral degradation that this entailed for traditional Catholic values on the other. As such, the work of Herrera did not only mean a turning point in the history of ideas, but also in the political development of Peru itself. If anything characterized Herrera’s teaching, it was his yearning to create a new political elite capable of overcoming the ravages of the liberal anarchy that had been established since the founding of the republic. To a large extent, Herrera’s political and religious thought took ideas from French Doctrinaires—a stream of eighteen-century rationalist thought that opposed the guiding principles of both absolutism and liberalism—in order to uphold the supremacy of common sense or the judgement of reason—in an attempt to align them with the political needs of the Catholic Church. Herrera’s political conception of the sovereignty of the intelligence, which is the focus of the present chapter, was in fact a political concept first articulated by the Spanish counter-revolutionary thinker Juan Donoso Cortés. Like Donoso Cortés, Herrera argued for the indivisibility of political power which is represented by the intellectual skills of the most capable. According to him, only such intellectual elites could adequately understand the divine natural order, an idea than in turn would shape his own doctrines concerning the legitimate right of those best prepared to rule over others.

62. Swami Vivekananda: Practical Vedanta [+–]

Swami Medhananda

Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education

Swami Medhananda is Senior Research Fellow, Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education.

Swami Vivekananda (d. 1902 CE) was an Indian monk and philosopher renowned for introducing Hinduism and Vedānta to the West. Although he was a champion of Advaita (Nondual) Vedānta, his interpretation of Advaitic philosophy differed in important respects from Śaṅkara’s Advaita Vedānta. According to Śaṅkara, the sole reality is the impersonal nondual Brahman, so the personal God, the world, and individual souls are nonexistent from the ultimate standpoint. For Śaṅkara, Karma-Yoga (the Yoga of Selfless Work) was thus a helpful preparatory discipline for purifying one’s mind, but once one attains sufficient mental purification, one should stop practicing Karma-Yoga and practice only the higher discipline of Jñāna-Yoga (the Yoga of Knowledge), which consists of reflection and meditation on Upaniṣadic statements about our identity with the nondual Brahman. In November 1896, Vivekananda delivered a series of four lectures in London on the theme of “Practical Vedānta” in which he attempts to demonstrate how the highest truths of Advaita Vedānta can be made practical in our everyday lives. In contrast to Śaṅkara, Vivekananda holds that the ultimate reality is both personal and impersonal and that this world is a real manifestation of God. He derives an ethics of social service on the basis of this expansive panentheistic metaphysics. Since everyone is a manifestation of God, we serve and worship God through the service of humanity.

63. Wāṣif ʿAlī Wāṣif: Separation and Union [+–]

Amer Latif

Emerson College

Amer latif is Associate Professor of Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies, Emerson College.

In this essay, Wāṣif ʿAlī Wāṣif (d. 1993 CE), a prominent Pakistani poet, essayist, philosopher, and Sufi master, explores the problem raised by a fundamental feature of human existence: most of our lives are lived in separation from the objects of our desires and are sustained by the hopes of attaining these objects. We are not where we want to be; we imagine that the fullness of life is not here but there; our now lacks the fullness we crave, and we feel that this fullness will be found in a future then. Wāṣif ʿAlī’s treatment of this problem not only shows the mutual interdependence of this and that, now and then, and separation and union, but it does so without erasing the differences between our experiences of separation and union. As such, this short essay exemplifies the holistic scope of the Islamic doctrine of tawḥīd—asserting the unity and oneness of God. In practice, tawḥīd, which literally means “making one,” is a perspective that takes the myriad realities and qualities of our experience and makes them one by relating them all back to God—the perpetual and inexhaustible Source of all realities and all qualities.

64. Thomas Yellowtail: Make Your Choice [+–]

Michael Fitzgerald holds a doctorate of jurisprudence from Indiana University.

In this selection Thomas Yellowtail (d. 1993 CE) speaks of the spiritual decline in our modern industrial civilization and the native prophesies about the end of the world. He also explains his understanding of the relationship of the great world religions to each other and the responsibility of each person toward God and then details ongoing efforts to encourage American Indians to follow their traditions and educate everyone about their spiritual ways. This background is followed by an uplifting message to all people of the world about their respective life choices. The Sun Dance chief closes with a prayer to Acbadadea, the Maker of All Things Above, to give people the wisdom to see these things and the strength to resist wrongdoing.

V Selfhood, Death, Liberation

65. Vasubandhu: The Commentary on the Treasury of Abhidharma [+–]

Charles Goodman

Binghamton University

Charles Goodman is Professor of Philosophy, Binghamton University.

This chapter presents a debate between two schools of Buddhism about how to reconcile the central Buddhist teaching of no-self with the pan-Indian belief in reincarnation. One participant in the debate is Vasubandhu, perhaps the greatest exponent and defender of the reductionist realism of the Abhidharma tradition. He maintained that agency and subjectivity could be explained wholly through the interplay of complex, constantly changing events and processes, without any ultimately real self. His interlocutor represents the Vātsīputrīyas, an extinct non-Mahāyāna school of Buddhist thought. The Vātsīputrīyas are also known as “those who advocate the doctrine of the person.” The “person” is a sui generis entity postulated to explain personal unity and identity. Buddhists analyze the empirical personality into five “aggregates”: form, feeling, conceptions, conditioning, and consciousness. They deny that there is a soul distinct from these aggregates. But the person, for the Vātsīputrīyas, is ineffable: we cannot say that it is either identical to, or distinct from, the aggregates. The debate largely takes the form of scriptural exegesis. But the argument touches on a number of important philosophical issues, including the relations between entities and their properties, reductionism and holism, the canons of interpretation, and the nonliteral use of language.

66. Candrakīrti: Introduction to the Middle Way and Its Autocommentary [+–]

Jay L. Garfield

Smith College

Jay L. Garfield is Professor of Philosophy and Buddhist Studies, Smith College.

This entry presents a selection of translations from Candrakīrti’s (d. 650 CE) Introduction to the Middle Way and Its Autocommentary which is structured by the bodhisattva path—the map of practice for one who resolves to achieve awakening in order to benefit all sentient beings. Each of its ten chapters is devoted to one of the ten stages on that path, explaining the qualities to be achieved on that stage, and the nature of practice on that stage. The sixth chapter from which the present excerpt is drawn, comprises about two thirds of the entire text. It is devoted to the stage at which the bodhisattva cultivates wisdom and articulates the content of that wisdom, an account that draws on Nāgārjuna’s own analysis of emptiness. A great deal of that discussion is devoted to how to understand the selflessness of persons, a central Buddhist metaphysical tenet. Candrakīrti argues that while the self is an illusion, persons are conventionally real, thus showing how to understand our own existence through the rubric of the two truths developed by Nāgārjuna.

67. Saraha: The Deathless Body Treasury Diamond Song [+–]

Lara Braitstein,Julia Stenzel

McGill University

Lara Braitstein is Associate Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, McGill University.

Kathmandu University

Julia Stenzel is Assistant Professor of Buddhist Studies, Rangjung Yeshe Institute, Kathmandu University.

Saraha is among the best-known of the 84 Great Adepts (mahāsiddhas) of Indic Buddhism and is famed for his antinomian lifestyle and teaching through poetic utterances. His poems combine earthy imagery with esoteric meditation instructions, interspersed with biting critiques of hypocrisy and empty ritual in any number of religious traditions. His pithy verses may be most helpfully understood as instructions to be recalled while engaging in practice. The poem translated here as The Deathless Body Treasury Diamond Song circles back repeatedly to the theme of nonduality; the inseparability of samsara (cyclic existence) and nirvana (the state beyond suffering), appearance and emptiness, activity and stillness, thinking and non-thinking, and so forth. For Saraha, the aim of the practitioner is not to abandon the busyness of one for the peace of the other. Instead, he demonstrates in his words and with his life example that no phenomena are excluded from the experience of the ultimate. Inseparability, nonduality, and equanimity are words that point to the experience of all phenomena having the single taste of awakening. The details of various experiences differ wildly but not so the nature of experience itself. When the natural wakefulness of a moment of mind meets any stimulus, the resultant co-emergence is an opportunity to taste awakening.

68. Haribhadrasūri: Introduction to the Doctrine of Non-One-Sidedness [+–]

Anil Mundra

Rutgers University-New Brunswick

Anil Mundra is Alka Siddhartha Dalal Postdoctoral Fellow, Rutgers University-New Brunswick.

The doctrine of non-one-sidedness (anekāntavāda) is often considered to be the central philosophy of the Indian religion of Jainism. It is most basically the thesis that real things consistently admit of contrary predicates: e.g. existence and non-existence, permanence and impermanence, etc. Haribhadrasūri, an influential scholar monk credited with producing a vast and various corpus around the eighth century CE, refused the polarization of various philosophical schools of his time that tended to favor one or the other of these one-sided descriptions to the exclusion of its opposite. In this selection from his Introduction to the Doctrine of Non-One-Sidedness (Anekāntavādapraveśa)—a primer of his magnum opus, the Victory-Flag of Non-One-Sidedness (Anekāntajayapatākā)—Haribhadrasūri argues that liberation is only possible if the self is neither absolutely permanent nor impermanent, but rather both stable and changing from moment to moment. He adduces common-sense examples of how contrary predicates can apply to the same thing at the same time (but always only qualifiedly such that one or the other never obtains absolutely), and sets some of the basic terms for all later treatments of the doctrine of non-one-sidedness.

69. Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇtha: An Examination of Self and God [+–]

Alex Watson

Ashoka University

Alex Watson is Professor of Indian Philosophy at Ashoka University.

In this passage a 10 th century Śaiva author, Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha, attempts to establish the existence of a self against a Buddhist opponent. But after the Buddhist has made his initial contention, Rāmakaṇṭha responds not from his own point of view, but in the voice of a Naiyāyika. Rāmakaṇṭha has the Buddhist defeat the Naiyāyika, followed by a Vaiśeṣika and a Sāṃkhya. Only then does Rāmakaṇṭha begin writing in his own voice. He presents his Śaiva view of the self as superior to that of the Naiyāyikas, Vaiśeṣikas and Sāṃkhyas in that it is not susceptible to the Buddhist arguments that are capable of destroying them. One of the differences between the Naiyāyika, Vaiśeṣika and Sāṃkhya views, on the one hand, and Rāmakaṇṭha’s Śaiva view, on the other, is that for the former the self can only be inferred, whereas for Rāmakaṇṭha it can be perceived. The other important difference concerns the relationship between the self and the stream of “consciousness” or “cognition” (jñāna). For the Naiyāyikas, Vaiśeṣikas and Sāṃkhyas, self and cognition are ontologically distinct. For Rāmakaṇṭha they are the same thing. The self consists in the constant shining forth of cognition. The crucial difference between the Buddhist view and the Śaiva view is that for the former cognition is momentary, whereas for the latter it persists uninterrupted.

70. Cheng Yi: What Kind of Learning Was It that Yanzi Loved? [+–]

Philip J. Ivanhoe

Georgetown University

Philip J. Ivanhoe is Professor and Chair of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Georgetown University.

What Kind of Learning Was It that Yanzi Loved? is one of Cheng Yi’s most famous and influential essays. It expresses his belief in a fundamental tension between the physical world, the realm of qi, and the realm of pattern-principle (li); he saw the former as a clear and ever-present threat to a thorough understanding of the latter and so an impediment to the realization of the oneness between self and world. The text goes on to describe the proper course of learning, a path that was said to lead to the rectification of the heart-mind through the investigation of things and the extension of knowledge. Such knowledge or “clarity” (ming) properly orients one to pursue an understanding of one’s nature and practice the correct way to nurture it. By maintaining an attitude of reverence, the process of deepening knowledge of one’s nature leads one to complete the self and return to integrity, thereby achieving the goal of being a sage.

71. Zeng Cao: The Transmission of the Dao from Zhongli to Lü [+–]

Livia Kohn

Boston University

Livia Kohn is Professor Emerita of Religion and East Asian Studies, Boston University.

The Transmission of the Dao from Zhongli to Lü is the first integrated account of the complex system of internal alchemy, the core of Daoist spiritual practice since the Song dynasty (960–1268 CE). It is recorded first in the Pivot of the Dao by the bibliophile Zeng Cao (fl. 1131–1155) and in teaching goes back to the 11th century. It records the alleged transmission of the Daoist teachings among two of the legendary Eight Immortals, from Zhongli Quan to Lü Dongbin. The text proceeds in eighteen sections, many of which describe specific techniques of internal alchemy, and the very first part provides a clear picture of the Daoist view of how human beings come into the world and how they can attain transcendence and immortality.

72. Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī: The Lofty Pursuits [+–]

Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed

University of California, Berkeley

Nora Jacobsen Ben Hammed is Assistant Professor of Islamic Thought, UC Berkeley.

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210 CE) is arguably the most important Islamic philosopher-theologian whose thought fundamentally developed in conversation with and in response to the dominating presence of Avicenna’s philosophy throughout the Islamic world. His influence extending beyond that of even the famous Ghazālī, Rāzī exercised a lasting imprint upon the traditions of Arabic logic, Islamic philosophy and theology, and Quranic exegesis, both directly through his writings and through his impact on further generations of scholars. The translated text is taken from Rāzī’s last magnum opus of philosophical theology, The Lofty Pursuits (al-Maṭālib al-ʿāliya), a voluminous work that represents the fruition of a lifetime of wrestling with Islamic philosophy. In contrast to his earliest works of theology, and in what is arguably the most significant shift in Rāzī’s thinking, he here embraces the immaterial human soul and presents his readers with a series of arguments that prove its existence. Of particular note are arguments eight and ten in which Rāzī describes the soul’s influence as in opposition to that of the body. He argues that it is the immaterial soul that is the locus of human perfection and eternal felicity, a state ensured by self-purification, measured asceticism, and the pursuit of knowledge.

73. Ibn ʿArabī: The Meccan Openings [+–]

Amer Latif

Emerson College

Amer latif is Associate Professor of Comparative Religion and Islamic Studies, Emerson College.

The text presented here is a translation from the highly influential Spanish Sufi philosopher Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 1240 CE) Meccan Openings on the theme of human nature. Our author tackles this question by making connections between the book of the cosmos, the book of revealed scripture, and the book of the human soul. These texts demonstrate an important feature of Ibn ʿArabī’s philosophical approach—the use of metaphor as method, that is, to see one reality in terms of another and to find identity between different realities based on shared qualities. Our passage also exemplifies the constant dialectical movement between affirming and denying the same reality as another feature of Ibn ʿArabī’s worldview. This dialectic of affirmation and negation is grounded in the logic of the Islamic doctrine of tawḥīd, the declaration of the oneness of God/reality. We are here reminded that negation followed by an affirmation is the logic of creation where everything is both God/not-God, Real/unreal, Subsistent/passing.

74. Tanḥum ha-Yerushalmi: Commentary on the Song of Songs [+–]

Raphael Dascalu

Monash University

Raphael Dascalu is Adjunct Research Associate in Jewish Philosophy, Monash University.

This passage is from Tanḥum ha-Yerushalmi’s (d. 1291 CE) commentary on Song of Songs 2:7. Tanḥum interpreted Song of Songs as an account of the human soul’s yearning for contact with the Divine, for the journey of the soul towards the Beloved, and for the ultimate union between the soul and her Creator. In his introduction to the commentary, his interpretation of biblical verses, and in lengthy excurses, Tanḥum devotes ample space in the commentary to scientific and philosophical topics, though at the core of them is psychology—the science of the soul. In this passage, Tanḥum identifies three stations in the soul’s journey towards her Beloved. These stages entail intense moral and spiritual training, and culminate in the loss of the boundaries of individual consciousness in conjunction with the Active Intellect at the moment of death. This account strongly echoes the positions of the great Andalusian philosopher Ibn Bājja (d. 1138) and Moses Maimonides (d. 1204). Tanḥum’s account of the modes of spiritual journeying is deeply informed by Islamic philosophical and mystical sources, powerfully illustrates the blurry boundaries between philosophy, scriptural exegesis, and spiritual praxis, as well as the deep engagement of medieval Jewish intellectuals with their Islamicate cultural milieu.

75. Maḥmūd Shabistarī: The Rosegarden of Mystery – Shams al-Dīn Lāhījī: Keys to the Wonderous Exposition [+–]

Mukhtar H. Ali

University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

Mukhtar H. Ali is Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.

Maḥmūd Shabistarī’s (d. 1320 CE) Gulshan-i rāz (The Rosegarden of Mystery) is among the most important expositions of the doctrines of the Sufi philosopher Ibn ʿArabī. The work has been subject to numerous commentaries, the most famous being the Persian commentary by Shams al-Dīn Lāhījī (d. 1506/7 CE) entitled Mafātīḥ al-iʿjāz fī sharḥ Gulshan-i rāz (Keys to the Wondrous Exposition: A Commentary upon the Rosegarden of Mystery) written in 1473. Lāhījī’s 800-page exposition of Shabistarī’s work is perhaps the most exhaustive treatment of Ibn ʿArabī thought and a major contribution to the philosophical Sufi tradition. The present entry discusses the nature of the self: Shabistarī asserts that the “I” of selfhood is first and foremost the Ipseity of Absolute Being. When Being is individuated, It refers to Itself as an “I.” Yet multiplicity, and hence other “selves,” arise from Being in the same way light shines through the apertures of the lattice of a lamp-niche. Drawing from the Quran’s famous Light Verse, our authors then describe the microcosmic “I” vis-à-vis the inward degrees of the human spirit.

76. Hakuin: The Sound of One Hand [+–]

Masayo Suemura

Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture

Masayo Suemura is Van Bragt Junior Research Fellow, Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture.

Hakuin Ekaku (d. 1768 CE) was a leading Zen monk in Edo Period, known as the second founder of the Rinzai School in Japan. He emphasized the importance of enlightenment in Zen, and carried out an extensive systematization of the Kanna Zen established by Dahui Zonggao (d. 1163 CE) in the Song dynasty. Kanna Zen is one of two type Koan Zen, which studies koan by concentrating consciousness in zazen. The other Koan Zen is Monji Zen studying koan by written explanations and verses. This section is the translation of the "The Sound of One Hand” koan, which is one of the most famous of his koan systems and belongs to the first “Dharmakāya” stage of the five stages. He created this koan by himself and asserted that it was superior to previous koans. To hear “the sound of one hand” is to hear the soundless sound. That is, it means realizing the absolute level beyond the physical senses. Here, Hakuin describes the Buddha’s six supernatural abilities attained by enlightenment, and uses the Buddha and Princess Chūjō hime, a Japanese court lady, as examples to explain the importance of the principle of cause and effect in Buddhism, encouraging that one should practice in order to hear “the sound of one hand.”

77. Charles Eastman: On the Border-Land of Spirits [+–]

Michael Fitzgerald holds a doctorate of jurisprudence from Indiana University.

In this selection, Charles Eastman informs us of an American Indian’s attitude toward and understanding of death, as well as the funeral customs of Plains tribes.

78. Black Elk: The Keeping of the Soul [+–]

Michael Fitzgerald holds a doctorate of jurisprudence from Indiana University.

In this chapter, the Lakota holy man Black Elk recounts some of the sacred rites of the Lakota related to death and dying.

79. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan: The Hindu View of Life [+–]

Swami Medhananda

Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education

Swami Medhananda is Senior Research Fellow, Ramakrishna Institute of Moral and Spiritual Education.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (d. 1975 CE) was an Indian philosopher and statesman who served as President of India from 1962 to 1967. In the following excerpts from The Hindu View of Life, Radhakrishnan discusses the doctrines of karma and rebirth, his eschatological theory of collective salvation, and the state of the person who is liberated while living. He takes pains to demonstrate that the law of karma does not entail fatalism or the complete absence of free will. Rather, he argues that while the law of karma determines the circumstances of our present life as well as our physical makeup and mental tendencies, we nonetheless have the freedom to shape our character by engaging in ethical or unethical actions. He also defends a highly original eschatological doctrine of collective salvation (sarvamukti) which combines elements of classical Advaita Vedānta, the Bodhisattva ideal, and the doctrine of social service and spiritual compassion taught by Swami Vivekananda. According to Radhakrishnan, liberated individuals, instead of merging with the nondual Absolute, retain their individuality in order to help others achieve liberation. Once everyone attains liberation, they commune blissfully with one another in the divine community of the realm of Brahman (brahmaloka), living in the direct presence of the loving personal God until the universe itself dissolves and those in brahmaloka lapse into the nondual Absolute.

80. Luis Villoro: The Origin and Task of Existentialism in Mexico [+–]

Carlos Alberto Sánchez

San Jose State University

Carlos Alberto Sánchez is Professor of Philosophy, San Jose State University.

In Origin and Task of Existentialism in Mexico the Mexican philosopher Luis Villoro gives an existentialist account explaining why this European tradition was so quickly absorbed into the Mexican philosophical consciousness. According to Villoro, existentialism represented an approach to Mexican reality that would not be a mere focus or description of Mexico’s historical legacy but an opening into possibilities previously unknown. If, as existentialism claimed, all was flux, becoming, and unfolding, then the Mexican future would not have to be thought of as a mere repetition of its past. In other words, the project of existentialism is shown to be an intellectual project allowing Mexican persons to see beyond the catastrophes of their history and to their most concrete and realizable possibilities.

End Matter

Appendix 1: Timeline of Philosophers

Carleton University

Appendix 2: Sourcebook Contributors

Carleton University

Appendix 3: Some Suggested Titles in Global Philosophy