Faith, the whole, and the pair

“Thus have I heard”

In a library in London there is a scroll about five meters long, printed on paper in the ninth century. The end of the scroll carries a date: the fifteenth day of the fourth month in the ninth year of the Xiantong reign, which is 11 May 868. It says that Wang Jie had it made “for universal free distribution,” on behalf of his two parents. It is a copy of the Diamond Sutra, in the Chinese translation made by Kumārajīva in the early fifth century. A Daoist monk, Wang Yuanlu, found it in 1900 in a sealed cave at Dunhuang, on the Silk Road, and Aurel Stein bought it there in 1907. It is usually called the oldest dated printed book in the world; earlier printed paper exists, but none with a date like this one.

The first line of the text is four characters long: 如是我闻 (rúshì wǒ wén), “Thus have I heard.” Almost every Buddhist sutra opens with it, and tradition says the speaker is Ānanda, the Buddha’s attendant, who recited the discourses at a council held soon after the Buddha’s death. Modern scholars doubt many details of that account. What matters here is the form: the text does not say “I think” or “I have decided.” It says, in effect, “this is not mine.”

That is the starting point for a question that follows from the last lesson. If religion offers a remedy, what makes people trust it? This course’s answer, in this reading, is faith, and it argues that faith is not the same as fantasy. When you read a novel you know someone wrote it, that the author intended something, and you can ask why they wrote it that way. When believers receive sacred words, many hold, no human author’s intentions stand in between. The Mīmāṃsā school of Hindu thought calls the Vedas apauruṣeya, “not of a person.” Muslims hold that the Qur’an is the speech of God, which the Prophet Muhammad recited. Jewish tradition holds that the Torah was given at Sinai. For Buddhist sutras the claim is “thus have I heard.”

One tradition does not fit the pattern as tidily, and the course must say so. Christians hold that the Bible has human authors, inspired by God. Catholic teaching since the Second Vatican Council (Dei Verbum, 1965) says God chose men who were “true authors” of the sacred books. So “no human author” is how many traditions describe their texts, but not how all of them do.

The course draws a consequence. In ordinary reading we keep testing: does this fit the facts, what was the writer after, is it relevant to what I need? In this reading, faith is partly the decision to stop reading that way, and to receive the words as true. That explains something puzzling: arguments against a belief often slide off a believer, and may even deepen the belief. The refutation is aimed at a human claim, and the believer does not hold it as one. It also separates two verbs. You can believe that something is the case, as you believe that it will rain. To believe in something is to give it your trust. The course says that faith is the second, and that it has a strong form, trust without holding a reserve of doubt.

The Way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.

Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard Improved, almanac for 1758

Franklin’s maxim is often quoted as a dry summary of this view. He followed it with a joke: the morning daylight appears plainer when you put out your candle. Franklin was no scoffer, but he was no simple believer either, and the line can be read as a compliment, a warning, or both. The course quotes it for the picture it draws, reason as a lamp that faith does not use, and not as Franklin’s last word.

The fruit and the mirror

Two stories, one from each of the two traditions this course follows, show faith’s problem from opposite sides: how far away is the transcendent? The first is in Genesis. God has told the first man and woman they may eat from every tree in the garden except one, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The serpent asks the woman whether God really said so, and tells her that on the day she eats, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” The text continues: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat.” (Genesis 3:5–6, King James Version.) Notice two details. The text never calls the fruit an apple. And wisdom is in the story: the tree is “to be desired to make one wise.”

How the story is read differs a good deal. In Western Christianity, following Augustine (354–430), it describes an original sin that all human beings inherit, as in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (5:12). Eastern Orthodox Christians speak of “ancestral sin”: its consequences, death above all, pass on, but not the guilt. Judaism has no doctrine of original sin; its tradition speaks of an inclination to evil in each person that can be mastered. In the Qur’an, Adam and his wife slip, Adam receives words from his Lord and repents, and God turns to him. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, in 1786, read the story as the first step from instinct to reason and freedom, a loss of innocence and a gain. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s lectures on Genesis in the early 1930s read “knowing good and evil” as the human wish to be like God by judging for oneself.

This course reads it like this: the fruit gives a judgment of good and bad measured by one’s own wants, a narrow view, set against the view of the whole that belongs to God, and the break is a break of trust. That is an interpretation, close to some of the readings above and different from others. On it, the transcendent keeps something back that human beings cannot take.

The second story is Buddhist. Mahāyāna texts teach that all beings have Buddha-nature, the capacity for awakening, as in the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra, translated into Chinese by Dharmakṣema in the 420s, and a line often cited from it, 一切众生悉有佛性, “all sentient beings have Buddha-nature.” On this view awakening is not a gift from outside; it is a nature to be uncovered. A famous poem in the Platform Sutra puts it as a mirror: in the story, the senior monk Shenxiu writes that the body is a bodhi tree and the mind a bright mirror-stand, which we must wipe constantly so that no dust collects. Huineng, a layman who pounds rice at the monastery, answers with a poem that says there is no tree and no stand, and so no dust to wipe. The oldest manuscript, from Dunhuang, has two versions of that reply, and the best-known line, “fundamentally there is not a single thing,” is found only in later editions. The point of the exchange stays the same: the mirror was never the problem; the dust is on the surface.

Buddhists also speak of the Buddha in three “bodies” (trikāya): the dharmakāya, the ultimate reality that cannot be described; the saṃbhogakāya, a body of joy that is the fruit of practice; and the nirmāṇakāya, the Buddha who appears in the world, in a particular time and place. The visible Buddha, in this scheme, is one way the unseen reality shows itself. In the course’s reading, this makes the Buddhist picture one of nearness, where the Genesis picture is one of distance.

The view from above

On 24 December 1968, the three astronauts of Apollo 8 went around the Moon for the ninth time and broadcast to Earth. Earlier that day, on the fourth orbit, William Anders had photographed the Earth rising above the lunar horizon. Now, in a broadcast that by one estimate reached about a quarter of the people then alive, the three men took turns reading the opening verses of Genesis. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” was read to the world from a spacecraft above the Moon.

In 1987 the writer Frank White gave a name to something that astronauts since then had described: the “overview effect,” a feeling of awe and connection that some people report when they see the Earth whole. Edgar Mitchell of Apollo 14 (1971) wrote of a sense of oneness. Whether the experience is common to all who fly, and what it changes, has been studied only a little.

This course uses the image to name what it calls the holistic view. Religion, in this reading, differs from other kinds of thinking in what it tries to cover. Science, philosophy, and the arts each narrowed their questions in turn, and each can say a great deal about one slice of the world. Religion keeps asking the whole question at once: What is the world, what is a life, what is it all for? Its answers come from a viewpoint above any one slice, and in this reading that is its use, whether or not its answers are accepted. Seen from far enough away, a quarrel in the office, then in the city, then between countries, looks smaller. The astronaut’s picture of a small blue world is an exaggerated version of the same effect.

The view from above has a limit that thinkers in several traditions have noticed. When the question is the whole, language runs out. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein ended his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (German 1921, English 1922) with a single line: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Mahāyāna Buddhism has a similar idea in a line of Nāgārjuna’s Middle Treatise, in Kumārajīva’s Chinese: 心行言语断, “the workings of the mind and the path of words are cut off.” Both point at what words cannot hold. Both also go on talking, since a teacher has to use words. Religious traditions have solved the problem with images, stories, and rituals, and the images tend to come in pairs.

Thinking in pairs

Look at the words religions use and a pattern shows. Heaven and earth. Sacred and profane. Saved and lost. The Buddhist 此岸 and 彼岸, “this shore” and “the far shore.” This course argues that the habit goes deeper than religion: human thought tends to proceed in pairs, such as good and bad, up and down, inside and outside, male and female, because pairs are the simplest way to cut a world into things we can handle. In this reading, religions use the pairs we already have, and then try to say what lies between them or beyond them.

The idea has a scholarly pedigree. Durkheim, as we saw, made the division of the sacred from the profane the core of religion. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the four volumes of his Mythologiques (1964–71), read the myths of the Americas as arrangements of oppositions. The first volume, The Raw and the Cooked (1964), treats cooking as a step from nature into culture, and the opposition of raw and cooked as the first of many that the myths juggle. In Chinese thought the oldest pair is 阴 and 阳, yin and yang. The Great Commentary on the Book of Changes says 一阴一阳之谓道, “one yin, one yang: this is called the Way.” Descartes in 1641 split mind from matter, and Kant argued in 1781 that space and time are the forms through which we must perceive. (They are sometimes called “categories,” but Kant kept that word for another list.)

Religions treat their pairs in at least three ways. Some set them against each other: this world against the next, the saved against the lost. Some balance them: yin and yang are not enemies; each gives way to the other and holds a seed of it, as the familiar black-and-white diagram suggests. And some, in this course’s reading Mahāyāna Buddhism above all, try to go beyond them: to see a pair as one thing looked at from two sides. The next lesson takes up the second kind of wisdom, and the last lesson takes up the third.