The World's Great Wisdom

Timeless Teachings from Religions and Philosophies

Roger Walsh, Roger Walsh

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781438449593
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is wisdom and how is it cultivated? These are among the most important questions we can ask, but questions that have been routinely ignored in modern times. In the twentieth century, the search for wisdom was replaced by a search for knowledge as science and technology promised answers to life's ills. However, along with scientific achievements came disasters, particularly the devastation of the planet through the accelerating use of modern technology. In an era drenched in data, a desire for wisdom has been reborn. Where can we go to learn about wisdom? The answer is clear: to the world's great religions and their accompanying philosophies and psychologies. The World's Great Wisdom makes these treasuries available. Practitioners from each of the great religions—as well as from Western philosophy and contemporary research—provide summaries of their traditions' understandings of wisdom, the means for cultivating it, and its implications for the modern world. This book offers distillations of the world's accumulated wisdom—ancient and modern, religious and scientific, philosophical and psychological. It is a unique resource that for the first time in history brings together our collective understanding of wisdom and the ways to develop it.

1

Introduction

ROGER WALSH

Happy are those who find wisdom …
She is more precious than jewels,
And nothing you desire can compare with her. …
Get wisdom, get insight: do not forget.

—Book of Proverbs: The Bible

What is wisdom and how can it be cultivated? These are two of the most important questions of human existence, yet they are tragically neglected in our contemporary culture. We are inundated with information and drowning in data, yet largely bereft of wisdom. As T. S. Eliot (1936) put it:

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

This is a dangerous imbalance, and the fate of our species and our planet may well depend on giving wisdom a more central place in both our personal and public lives.

How did wisdom fade from our awareness? After all, for centuries it was revered as one of the greatest of all human virtues. Thousands of years ago, sages such as the Stoic philosopher Epictetus urged, “Content yourself with being a lover of wisdom, a seeker of truth” (Epictetus, 1995, p. 31), while Jewish proverbs exclaimed, “Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom” (Proverbs 4:7).

Yet in recent centuries, wisdom slipped from Western awareness. Dazzled by the flood of scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs, people dreamed that science would answer all questions and technology solve all problems. Science became scientism, technology the new savior, and knowledge—not wisdom—the key to living well.

Science and technology certainly delivered miracles. Yet in unwise hands, they also delivered unpredictable and unprecedented disasters, as the awesome power of modern technology dramatically multiplied the impact of human actions. As a result, populations exploded, pollution spread, resources were depleted, wars became genocidal, and the very health of the planet deteriorated.

Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, humankind now possesses enormous knowledge, awesome power, and little wisdom. And that is a potentially lethal combination. As Robert Sternberg, former president of the American Psychological Association, lamented, “If there is anything the world needs, it is wisdom. Without it, I exaggerate not at all in saying that very soon, there may be no world” (Sternberg, 2007).

Fortunately, recent years have seen the beginnings of a major reevaluation. Science is no longer worshiped as simply a savior, technophilia and technophobia jostle ambivalently, and wisdom is coming out of the closet. In society at large, there is talk of, for example, elder wisdom, native wisdom, and wisdom cultures.

Scientists have recently joined the quest. Though they long regarded it as too abstruse for investigation, research on wisdom is beginning. But though there is growing interest, the research is as yet preliminary and the information obtained is, by traditional standards, far from profound. The great questions of life and death that sages ponder are as yet unasked in modern laboratories. Of course, this is not surprising for a new research field. Moreover, science must measure and count. Yet what really matters can’t always be measured, and what really counts can’t always be counted.

If our contemporary culture has only a superficial understanding of wisdom, then the obvious question becomes, “Where can we go for the deepest understanding of wisdom and of how to develop it?” The answer is clear: to the world’s great religions and their accompanying philosophies and psychologies. For here, often hidden behind conventional beliefs and rituals, are preserved records of the insights of sages, the depths of existential exploration, and the heights of human understanding.

Of course, the world’s religions contain a curious mix of high and low, transcendence and nonsense, sagacity and stupidity. Yet the quest for wisdom has long been one of their central goals. For example, Jews and Christians claim that wisdom “is more precious than jewels” (Proverbs 3:15), while the Koran declares, “[T]those to whom wisdom is given; they truly have received abundant good” (Koran II: 269). In Hinduism the cultivation of wisdom constitutes a major spiritual path or yoga, while in Buddhism wisdom is regarded as the preeminent spiritual capacity.

But what we need above all else are methods to nurture wisdom. Fortunately, the contemplative core of the great religions contains these methods. Each tradition preserves methods for actually cultivating wisdom through systematic practices such as contemplation, meditation, yoga, and reflection on the great mysteries of life and death. These practices constitute a veritable “art of wisdom” or “science of wisdom.” At their best, therefore, the great religions contain both timeless treasuries of humankind’s accumulated wisdom and effective methods for fostering it.

How can this treasury be brought to the contemporary world? One strategic method is to gather distillations of wisdom from each of the great religions and their accompanying philosophies and psychologies. In short, to create a book that offers summaries of each tradition’s sapiential principles and practices. These are the goals of The World’s Great Wisdom.

To achieve these goals, I sought outstanding scholar-practitioners from each of the great religions, as well as from Western philosophy, to contribute chapters. These contributors are all both noted scholars with expert intellectual knowledge of their tradition as well as practitioners who use their tradition’s reflective and contemplative techniques themselves. They therefore have both intellectual and experiential expertise in their traditions. This direct experience and prolonged practice is essential, because if there is one thing on which the world’s wisdom traditions agree, it is that to fully comprehend deep wisdom requires careful preparation and practice.

Having found these contributors, I asked them to address several topics from the perspective of their traditions, and especially the major questions:

•  What is wisdom?

•  How is it cultivated?

•  What are its implications for individuals, society, and the world?

The book’s final section compares these chapters and examines wisdom from an integral perspective. This comparison allows us to identify unique features and common themes among traditions, and to extract general principles and practices.

Wisdom is both vast and profound, potentially encompassing all of life, and consequently we need a large framework from which to examine it. Integral theory offers a remarkably encompassing conceptual framework, and so the final chapters introduce integral theory and use it to enrich the comparative analyses.

The World’s Great Wisdom, therefore, offers a distillation and examination of the world’s priceless heritage of humanity’s deepest insights into the great questions and issues of life. It constitutes a unique resource that, for the first time in history, brings together one of our most priceless treasures: humankind’s understandings of wisdom and the ways to nurture it.

References

The Bible. King James Version.

The Bible. New Revised Standard Version.

Eliot, T. S. (1936). Collected poems 1919–1935. London: Faber & Faber.

Epictetus. (1995). The art of living (S. Lebell, Trans.). San Francisco: Harper San Francisco.

The Koran.

Sternberg, R. (2007). Wisdom, intelligence, and creativity synthesized. New York: Cambridge University Press.

2

Judaism and Its Wisdom Literature

RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO

Jewish wisdom, chochmah in Hebrew, isn’t as much a body of knowledge to be mastered, as it is a lifelong project to be undertaken. The aim of this project is spelled out in the opening verses of Sefer Mishlei, the Book of Proverbs:

These are the proverbs and parables of Solomon,
son of David, King of Israel, offered as
a guide to insight, understanding, and spiritual discipline
to help you become generous, honest, and balanced.
(Proverbs 1:1–3; author’s translation)

Wisdom and the pursuit of wisdom are valuable to all people, from the simple and the young to the seeker and the sage. Much of what is contained in Jewish wisdom literature is clearly aimed at the former, offering practical insights into the workings of the world that will benefit them as they mature and take their place as productive citizens of their communities. This is not the wisdom with which we will be concerned. Our goal is to reveal the core teaching of chochmah and a method for actualizing it in one’s daily life.

Chochmah, despite all attempts to tame her, is seditious. This is why the wise speak in parable and puzzle; to speak clearly is to place themselves at risk. For what they teach is not simply an alternative worldview, but a series of observations that eat at the foundations of the official worldview until that worldview collapses under its own weight, and with it the power of those who preach it.

Following the schema of Lawrence Kohlberg, director of Harvard’s Center for Moral Education, there are three categories of worldview: Preconventional, Conventional, and Postconventional, each with its own sense of wisdom and morality. The Preconventional worldview is rooted in the notion that those with superior power determine what is true, wise, and good. You know an action is good because compliance is rewarded, and resistance is punished. Wisdom is the system that identifies what is good and what is not based on reward and punishment, and truth is simply that set of ideas insisted upon by those with the power to enforce them.

One of the clearest expressions of Preconventionalism in the Hebrew Bible is the rebellion of Korah and the Elders of Israel against Moses found in the Book of Numbers (1–40). Relying on the notion, revealed by God, that all Israelites are holy and equal in the sight of God, Korah and 250 of the leaders of Israel demand that Moses replace his autocratic rule with a more democratic style of leadership (Numbers 16:3). The rebellion spreads to the entire people, and they gather behind Korah to confront Moses at the Tent of Meeting. Moses address the people this way:

“This is how you shall know that the LORD has sent me to do all these works; it has not been of my own accord … if the LORD creates something new, and the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up, with all that belongs to them, and they go down alive into Sheol, then you shall know that these men have despised the LORD.” As soon as he finished speaking all these words, the ground under them was split apart. The earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up, along with their households—everyone who belonged to Korah and all their goods. (Numbers 16:28–33, NRSV)

A more sophisticated expression of Preconventional thinking, one that arises on the heels of the “might makes right” model mentioned above, is transactional: I do to you what you do to me. The classic example of this in the Hebrew Bible can be found in Leviticus:

Anyone who maims another shall suffer the same injury in return: fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; the injury inflicted is the injury to be suffered. One who kills an animal shall make restitution for it; but one who kills a human being shall be put to death. You shall have one law for the alien and for the citizen: for I am the LORD your God. (Leviticus 24:19–22, NRSV)

In Preconventional worldviews right and wrong are determined by power and personal satisfaction. In Conventional worldviews a more sophisticated level of thinking is required that subsumes individual happiness to group cohesion. The community rather than the powerful individual determines what is good and true and wise. Adherence to the community’s rules and laws, rather than the often arbitrary whim of the powerful, now constitutes morality.

This is the worldview to which most people ascribe, and upon which much of Judaism in its contemporary form rests. The central teaching of the Conventional worldview is that wisdom and morality lie with group conformity. The official worldview of Judaism, then and now, clearly falls within Kohlberg’s category of Conventional. It is articulated in the Book of Deuteronomy and read twice daily in the liturgy:

If you will only heed his every commandment that I am commanding you today—loving the LORD your God, and serving him with all your heart and with all your soul—then he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, and you will gather in your grain, your wine, and your oil; and he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you will eat your fill. (Deuteronomy 11:13–15, NRSV)

Simply put, the official worldview of Judaism is this: do good, get good; where “doing good” is defined as keeping the mitzvot (divine commandments), and “getting good” is defined as material success. The problem with this theology is that it doesn’t hold up under the contingencies of everyday life. It doesn’t take much investigation to see that good people often suffer while wicked people often prosper. Nor does it take a detailed examination of Jewish history to see that even the most observant Jews fall victim to God’s blazing wrath. Unless we assume that God’s angry fire, manifest in our time as the flames of the Nazi crematoria, took the lives of nonobservant Jews only, it is terrifyingly obvious that the “do good, get good” theology is farcical. But you don’t have to be a Holocaust historian to question this theology, as the ancient wisdom sages, especially the author of the Book of Job, make clear.

The worldview of the wisdom sages falls into Koh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Judaism and Its Wisdom Literature
• 3. Wisdom in the Christian Tradition
• 4. The Wisdom of Gratitude in Islam
• 5. Wisdom: The Hindu Experience and Perspective
• 6. The Innate Awareness of Buddhist Wisdom
• 7. Wisdom and the Dao
• 8. The Confucian Pursuit of Wisdom
• 9. Wisdom in Western Philosophy
• 10. The World’s Great Wisdom: An Integral Overview
• 11 Reviving Wisdom: What Will It Take?
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover