The Awakened Ones

Phenomenology of Visionary Experience

Gananath Obeyesekere

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231527309
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

While a rational consciousness grasps many truths, Gananath Obeyesekere believes an even richer knowledge is possible through a bold confrontation with the stuff of visions and dreams. Spanning both Buddhist and European forms of visionary experience, he fearlessly pursues the symbolic, nonrational depths of such phenomena, reawakening the intuitive, creative impulses that power greater understanding.

Throughout his career, Obeyesekere has combined psychoanalysis and anthropology to illuminate the relationship between personal symbolism and religious experience. In this book, he begins with Buddha's visionary trances wherein, over the course of four hours, he witnesses hundreds of thousands of his past births and eons of world evolution, renewal, and disappearance. He then connects this fracturing of empirical and visionary time to the realm of space, considering the experience of a female Christian penitent, who stares devotedly at a tiny crucifix only to see the space around it expand to mirror Christ's suffering. Obeyesekere follows the unconscious motivations underlying rapture, the fantastical consumption of Christ's body and blood, and body mutilation and levitation, bridging medieval Catholicism and the movements of early modern thought as reflected in William Blake's artistic visions and poetic dreams. He develops the term "dream-ego" through a discussion of visionary journeys, Carl Jung's and Sigmund Freud's scientific dreaming, and the cosmic and erotic dream-visions of New Age virtuosos, and he defines the parameters of a visionary mode of knowledge that provides a more elastic understanding of truth. A career-culminating work, this volume translates the epistemology of Hindu and Buddhist thinkers for western audiences while revitalizing western philosophical and scientific inquiry.

Book 1

THE VISIONARY EXPERIENCE

Theoretical Understandings

THE AWAKENED BUDDHA AND THE BUDDHIST AWAKENING

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall,

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No Worst There Is None”

I HOPE MY READER will not be too surprised if I begin my discussion of the Buddha’s spiritual awakening with an epigraph from a late-nineteenth-century Jesuit poet and priest. Here as elsewhere in this essay I blur the distinction between religions insofar as the visionary experience is concerned. Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his “terrible sonnets,” powerfully evoked the dark night of the soul and the unfathomed depths of the mind that, even as he was writing, were being formulated by his scientific contemporaries, especially in Paris, as the “subconscious,” in the more prosaic language of the psychological sciences of their time. Although products of different discourses, the rich metaphoric language of the poet and the scientific discourse of French psychologists like Jean Charcot and Pierre Janet dealt with those depths that lie outside our normal waking consciousness. A few years after Hopkins’s death, William James gave expression to similar notions in his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience in the chapter on “Mysticism.” “One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”¹ James was far too much of a rationalist to be able to get into a mystical trance state himself, but he did try to approximate that condition by experimenting with drugs, in his case with nitrous oxide (a noxious substance, though perhaps not as bad as ether, which he also recommended for this purpose). James believed, in this pre-LSD and pre-peyote era, that sometimes chloroform or even a large dose of alcohol would also suffice. Although an artificially induced state, his experiences did, he says, “converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance” and even a “genuine revelation.” In that induced mystical experience the opposites of the world are reconciled. He admits this is a “dark saying,” but adds, “I cannot wholly escape from its authority.”² James was certainly aware that, whatever the religious tradition concerned, “mystical” experiences are often carefully cultivated and controlled and must therefore of necessity be qualitatively different from drug-induced hypnomantic states.³

Although in this essay I follow the footsteps of the master, I must confess that I have not experimented with hallucinogens; even a rare overdose of alcohol has not given me the kind of mystical insight that James was blessed with. Moreover, James was only peripherally acquainted with Buddhism, whereas I come from a Buddhist background and, alongside my sympathy for both James and Buddhist thought, I also possess an intellectual affinity with thinkers like Nietzsche and Freud who broke the barriers that separate our normal consciousness from other forms of consciousness (the subconscious for James and the unconscious for Freud). In this essay I will tentatively open up to critical reflection a specific variety of the so-called mystical experience that James dealt with more systematically.

Anthropology, the discipline I represent, has dealt extensively with alien “modes of thought” and made detailed sociological analyses of spirit possession, shamanic trances, and related states, but rarely as vehicles for ideas to germinate and emerge as modes of thinking. James believed that the pathologies from which mystics suffer did not disqualify their religious experience. Yet some modern studies have implicitly and or explicitly tended to pathologize trance and visionary states, and this is also true of such labels as “altered states of consciousness” or “out-of-body experiences” or the “paranormal.” The moment you speak of altered states of consciousness you treat consciousness as the primary and indubitable desideratum and such things as trance, meditation, rapture, visionary experiences, and so forth are deviations of some sort from a norm of consciousness. So is it with the term paranormal. I would ask, are dreams paranormal? Similarly with the body, which, in the West, is again a fixed point, an indubitable reality, and out-of-body experiences have implicit pathological connotations. That “indubitable reality” is something that virtually every dreamer and visionary in this book has explicitly or implicitly questioned. While there are multiple forms of trance in the cross-cultural record, every society outside the European Enlightenment held that, except for spirit attack, forms of trance were desirable experiences, even though difficult to achieve. It was almost everywhere believed that, while spurious trances did occur, genuine trances provided access to knowledge outside our rational cognitive faculties that operate during our waking consciousness. I want to begin this essay with a sympathetic phenomenological understanding of Buddhist meditative trance, a form of life that has lost its popularity in the West but nevertheless continues to exist in many contemporary societies, as it did in Europe’s past, and its hidden present, and in the rest of the world as one of the most powerful ways of generating knowledge or “truth,” which William James also clearly recognized.⁴

It was therefore not through William James that I initially came to understand trance but from my study of the Buddha’s own “enlightenment,” the process whereby he realized the soteriological goal of nirvana while yet living in the world. The term Buddha nowadays means one who is enlightened. And in both popular and Indological discourse the derivative term Enlightenment refers to the Buddha’s spiritual experience as he lay seated under the “bodhi tree,” the tree of enlightenment, in deep meditation. Though the term Enlightenment has come to mean the Buddha’s own transformative spiritual ascesis, there are those who prefer the terms awakened and awakening—which to me is the better translation of the Pali word bodhi from which the word Buddha is derived. My guess is that late-nineteenth-century translators imagined Theravada Buddhism not only as the original pristine Buddhism but also one that was consonant with the spirit of modernity and science, namely, rationality or Reason. I leave scholars better qualified than I am to explore the manner in which the European Enlightenment became fused with the Buddhist, but in this essay I will use the term awakening rather than the more popular term enlightenment.⁵

If, as I said, bodhi means awakening, one might ask: from what state did the Buddha awaken? To anticipate my later argument, the Buddha awoke from a physical and spiritual death into a new life very much in the way of an initiation ritual, imitating, in his own inimitable way, the lives of other heroes of myth. In order to understand this view of the Buddha’s spiritual experience, one must take the Buddhist mythos seriously rather than relegate it to secondary importance, the strategy of many Indologists as well as that of contemporary intellectuals in Buddhist nations.

European scholarship, influenced by its own Enlightenment, has tried to read a history behind the myth of the Buddha, his birth, life, dispensation, and death. While this is an admirable exercise, the Buddha is nothing if not a figure of the imagination for Buddhists through the many centuries. The imagined Buddha is not all that different from other mythic beings who, in popular thought, lived and walked the world. Thus the Buddha was conceived in a miraculous manner when his mother Maya was observing the precept on sexual abstinence. She could see him as a crystal in her womb. He emerged unsullied by blood, mucus, and other birth impurities. When he was born he took seven steps and then rose in the air and surveyed the eight quarters of the world, the locus of his universal and transcendental teaching. His mother Maya (significantly meaning “illusion”) died when he was seven days old because, as some texts put it, it was inconceivable for the pure womb of the Buddha’s mother to be sullied by sexual and childbirth impurity. The Buddha’s mother’s sister and his father’s cowife brought him up: she is Mahaprajapati Gotami, named after the Creator of Hindu mythology, perhaps because she was the creator of Gotama (Sanskrit, Gautama), the Buddha. The name of the father also takes on mythic significance: he is Suddhodana, odana meaning “pure boiled (milk) rice,” which in the Indic context has considerable fertility significance, either as a ritual food (milk-rice) or, according to some Vedic texts, “as a substitute for the male seed.”⁶ If the latter interpretation holds, then Suddhodana is endowed with a pure and rich substance or perhaps even a pure seed.⁷

When the Buddha was born, sages predicted that he would either be a world-conquering monarch or a world-renouncing Buddha. Both are models of heroes or great men (mahāpuruṣa), but they were of radically different orientations: one totally involved in the world of wealth and power and the other totally removed from it. They possess thirty-two bodily signs, the details of which are spelled out in Buddhist texts.⁸ Modern scholars who tell us that the father of the Bodhisattva (the Buddha to be) was a minor chief or raja are not only missing the point but are guilty of extrapolating an empirical reality from a mythic or symbolic set of events. For all you know, the empirical Buddha might not have had a father at all or, more likely, he had plain ordinary parents like yours or mine. This is not to say that the Buddha was not a historical figure as, indeed, Jesus was. His speaking voice vividly appears in many of the doctrinal discourses of Theravada Buddhism, if not of Mahāyāna, where he often appears as a surreal figure. Yet it is the case that the Buddha of the Buddhist imagination was born apposite to a world conqueror. The texts make this clear by the mythicization of his father, who is presented as a great king living in wealth, splendor, and power. The father wanted the Bodhisattva to be a world conqueror, as befits his heritage, and kept him confined to the walls of the palace, tempting him with the seductions of hedonism. The mansion of the prince has everything to satisfy the senses: women, music and dancing, luxury. Given this context, the birth of the Buddha makes sense: he is cast in the heroic mold of the world conqueror, the conqueror over the very things that embodied his other and more profound birthright—that of Buddhahood.

The confrontation of the two ideal models—royalty and renunciation—occurs in the famous myth of the four signs, which texts say were created by the gods.⁹ As I read this myth, the prince was a prisoner of hedonism, literally prevented from knowing the outside world by his well-intentioned father. Yet, one day, the prince goes for a drive into the city with Channa, his charioteer. There he meets with the spectacle of a feeble old man, a sight from which he had been insulated. In other visits to the city he sees the spectacle of sickness, then death, and finally the transcendence of all of these in the serene calm of the yellow-robed renouncer. The hero is confronted with the skull beneath the skin, the true nature of the world from which he had been insulated—the world of transience and decay. And he is also presented a model for overcoming them all in the sign of the renouncer. Note the setting: the hero travels in his splendid chariot to the city; what confronts him there is the very opposite of that which exists within the prison walls of his palace. When he comes back from his final trip to the city, after witnessing the sign of the homeless renouncer, he is told that a son is born to him, reminding him that he is trapped in a life of domesticity, that of the home, which, in the Buddhist renouncer tradition is another kind of prison. The child is named Rahula, the “fetter,” the chain that binds the Bodhisattva to the world and imprisons him there. But he decides to break this fetter and, silently bidding his wife and son farewell, he prepares to leave the palace.¹⁰

Prior to his departure, the Bodhisattva confronts the seamy spectral side of his harem, the once-beautiful women in their resplendent attire. “He saw those women who had lain aside their musical instruments and were sleeping, some with saliva pouring out of their mouths, some with the bodies wet with saliva, some grinding their teeth, some talking in their sleep, some groaning, some with gaping mouths and some others with their clothes in disorder revealing plainly those parts of the body which should be kept concealed for fear of shame. . . . The large terrace of his mansion, magnificently decorated and resembling the abode of Sakka [Indra, the king of the gods] appeared to him as a charnel ground full of corpses scattered here and there.”¹¹ The skull beneath the skin once again and the images of disgust resurrected time and again in Buddhist meditative practices on “revulsion.” This powerful myth is also known to practically everyone attuned to the living Buddhist traditions. It is also a “myth model” for other stories and other lives in Buddhist literature. It is of someone who is a prisoner of hedonism and/or of domesticity, then, seeing their unsatisfactory nature, deciding to renounce the world that contains them and idealizes them, the worlds of the king and the Brahmin, the one representing power and the life of the senses, the other the life of domestic harmony.¹²

Satiated with hedonism and indifferent to political power, the Bodhisattva leaves his palace accompanied by his charioteer Channa and his horse, Kanṭhaka, the latter portrayed in heroic dimensions in the Buddhist imagination. The horse reached the river Anoma, which it cleared in one bound, landing on the other shore. There the Bodhisattva cut his hair and beard, shed his royal clothes, and then donned mendicant garb, a change of attire that is ritually enacted to this very day when novices are initiated as fully ordained monks. Crossing the river in this and in similar cases is also a symbolic act: a movement from one form of life to another, from the world of the world conqueror to that of the world renouncer. The cutting off of worldly ties is complete, but he has still not achieved his goal of Buddhahood. The Bodhisattva is still not a Buddha; he remains a liminal persona.¹³ He has given up his royal status, but he has not yet “accomplished his aim,” the meaning of his first name, Siddhartha. Like neophytes in initiation rites and other heroes of myth, the Bodhisattva has many obstacles to overcome before he reaches ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Book 1: The Visionary Experience: Theoretical Understandings
• Book 2: Mahayana: Salvific Emptiness, Fullness of Vision
• Book 3: The Cosmic “IT”: the Abstract Being of the Intellectuals
• Book 4: Penitential Ecstasy: The Dark Night of the Soul
• Book 5: Christian Dissent: The Protest Against Reason
• Book 6: Theosophies: West Meets East
• Book 7: Modernity and the Dreaming
• Book 8: Contemporary Dreaming: Secular Spirituality and Revelatory Truth
• Envoi—Intimations of Mortality: The Ethnographer’s Dream And the Return of the Vultures
• Notes
• Glossary
• Index