Dom Sylvester Houédard (16th February 1924 - 15th January 1992) supplied copies of the original typescript of this document, characteristically signed “d.s.h.” to the Benedictine nuns of Talacre, the Abbot President of the English Benedictine Congregation, the Abbot President of the Subiaco Congregation, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and certain other persons, including the present Preliminary LibrArian I+N the Neith Network. If Dom Sylvester's original manuscript also survives, it will have been deposited by the Abbot & Community of Prinknash Abbey with the University of Manchester John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester, the official recipient of all such material as far as Prinknash Benedictines are concerned.
OR
PART I CATHOLIC TEACHING IN BUDDHIST TERMS
1. Both the Catholic Church and Buddhism teach -
2. Early contacts between Church and Buddhism -
Recent contacts between West and Mahayana -
3. Holy Rule on Receiving PEREGRINI & PEREGRINI-MONKS
4. Essence of Gospel & Rule: i.e., CONVERSIO has two aspects -
their indivisible union of DOCTRINA VIRTUTUMQUE is true meaning of YOGA
5. Both the Catholic Church and Buddhism are in essence
6. OUTLINE OF CATHOLIC MONASTIC THEOLOGY in concepts familiar to Buddhists
1. Bodhi & Lumen Deificum (or lumen gloriae)
2. Sutras & Tantras
3. Union of Wisdom & Method (of the two great Commandments)
4. Highest Yoga Tantra (12th degree of humility)
5. the Four Noble Truths
6. Samsara suffering & St. Bernard
7. Rebirth & Purgatory
8. Nirvana & Benedictine PAX
9. The Two Truths & Fuga Mundi
10. The Middle Way & Participation IN G-d
11. Wisdom & Method: Doctrina Virtutumque
12. Secret Mantra Tantra (Neptic guard of the heart & ceaseless prayer)
13. Deity Yoga & Mystical Body
14. Subtle Body & Glorified Body
15. Prasangika & Prima Veritas
16. Ati Yoga & the 12 degrees of humility
17. Dzogchen & the 12th degree of humility
18. Truth & Bliss (2 sides of Benedictine Ladder)
19. Ati yoga & epectasy
20. Ati yoga & Beatific Vision
21. Buddha Nature (the truth we have been 'from all eternity')
22. the Four monastic Orders of Tibet
23. Benedictine affinity with Nyingma & Kargyupta
A. True cessation & Benedict's vision of AD 540
B. Temptation of Buddha; Temptations of Christ
C. Middle Way of Christ & of Benedict
D. Old Testament doctrine of sunyata
E. Our knowledge of G-d by RIGPA (by EXCESSUS)
F. the Trikaya as Prophetic vajra-union of Temple & Kingdom
Appendix: a quotation from Karl Rahner
Addenda: I - IV
There is still (July 1986) no definite arrival date for the two Tibetan monks who have been invited by the Benedictines to visit our monasteries in Great Britain & Ireland. The visit is being made at the suggestion of the Dalai Lama & its main purpose is for them to learn about us, but it will also be an opportunity for us to learn about them. This is why I have divided my talk into two halves: the problem won't be one of language (since one at least of the visitors will speak English) but of terminology. Throughout this Paper I shall assume that SHUNYATA is best translated by EMPTINESS (rather than void, vacuity or nothingness) since that is the decision of Dr. Jeffrey Hopkins, translator to the Dalai Lama, & I shall assume that the best meaning of it, at least for us, is that everything in creation, without any exception whatsoever, is EMPTY OF ASEITAS. This means that when we speak to them about G-d they will understand us as speaking about that of which all things are empty. Owing to the custom of translating the Hindu word ATMAN by 'soul' it is quite essential to translate ANIMA by MIND & to make it plain that Catholics regard trichotomy as a heresy (Cf DS nn. 148, 255, 338, 480f, 738, 1655) exactly as they do, & the doctrine of ANATMAN, of 'no third thing other than mind & body', is the first dogma we can point to as identical for Buddhist & Catholic.
Other terms that might prove difficult to translate will never be as important as these which have been the source of so much unnecessary confusion in the past. I mention them specifically because of the Question on 'god' & 'soul' put by the Dalai Lama to Benedictines on his last visit to this country. However, since in Catholic dogma the creator is known from creation, & since in their terminology of the Two Truths, Buddhists call anything which is empty "a conventional truth" & its emptiness "an ultimate truth", we can follow St. Thomas, & as well as naming G-d 'that of which things are empty' we can also give G-d the name of First Truth or Prima Veritas.
Having said that I have given you a complete summary of this Paper, since it is the radiant light of Truth that constitutes the halo both in Buddhist art & in Catholic art.
The first western writer to mention Buddha by name is St. Clement of Alexandria (150-215), the city founded 500 years earlier by Alexander the Great in BC 331 just before he set off to conquer India. Alexandria never lost its interest in India, but the Indian ascetics written about before Clement seem more like Hindus or Jains than Buddhists. Apollonius, a contemporary of Christ (c. 1-97 AD) visited 18 monks near Taxila in AD 43 (where Iarchos their superior told him the community had numbered 87 two generations earlier) & he also visited monks in south Egypt about 75 AD close to the site later chosen by St. Pachomius (it was here that Thespesion their superior told him about monks from India living in Ethiopia). Apollonius refers to them as 'sages' since the word monastery (from which 'monk' later developed) was invented by Philo (another contemporary of Christ c. 15 BC - AD 45) when describing the Jewish community of therapeutae at Nitria who were later thought to have been disciples of St. Mark following the rule of Jewish-Catholics in Jerusalem living under James the Brother of the Lord as Luke describes in the Acts. For this reason, not only has Philo had an influence on Christian monasticism, but Antony & Amon chose Nitria to found the monastery made famous by St. John Cassian & Palladius through whom it became the principal ideal reflected in the Rule of St. Benedict.
Flinders Petrie found a stone in Alexandria inscribed with the Wheel & Trisula which he dated as contemporary with Philo & Apollonius & which must be the oldest dateable evidence of Buddhism in the West. By the time St. Jerome mentions Buddha in 393, the history of his birth had become known. From all this we can infer that a meagre possibility does exist that some Buddhist influence might have filtered via Philo, Nitria & Alexandria into the Rule of St. Benedict.
In spite of the West knowing about Buddhism for over 1800 years, & in spite of the scholarship of the last two centuries, it is only in this century that a deep & monastic understanding of Buddhist spirituality has become possible in general, & for Mahayana in particular the West had to wait till 1906 when SOKATSU SHAKU the Rinzai Master of RYOMO-AN temple then at Nippori in N. Tokyo, took 6 disciples to California. He was the disciple of SOYEN SHAKU (b. 1858) Abbot of ENGAKO-KYO ('The Sutra of Perfect Awakening') in Kamakura, founded 1278 by the Shogun TOKIMUNE (famous as defender of Japan against the invasion by Kublai Khan 3 years later) for the Chinese monk SOGEN MUGAKU (his prayers were answered by the KAMIKAZI wind that destroyed the invading fleet) known as Bukko Kokushi (The National Master of Buddha Light) whose Chinese name is TSU-YUAN WU-HSUE. Of the 6 disciples only SOKEI-AN (SHIGETSU SASAKI b. 1882) remained in America, & though he wrote only one book (other than articles for his periodical CAT'S YAWN), he taught Zen till he died at 63 in 1945.
Abbot Soeyn Shaku had suggested the American visit to the Master of Ryomo-an because he himself had attended the 1893 Parliament of Religions in Chicago where he met Paul Carus the publisher at whose request in 1897 he sent the 27 years old Daisetz Teitaro SUZUKI to America to prepare a translation of the Tao Te Ching, though it wasn't till 1927 that Suzuki published the first of his 30 English books on Zen. In 1936 Suzuki attended Younghusband's World Congress of Faiths in London & visited Prinknash to meet Dom Theodore Baily.
This Ch'an or Zen (same root as THINK & THANK in English, same root as TONSERE in Tibetan) of Tsu-yuan Wu-Hsue which was so much a rage in the 50's certainly prepared the West for the texts & commentaries made available after the exile of the Tibetans in 1959 who, under the guidance of the Dalai Lama, set themselves to explaining exactly what they taught, not only in Tibetan to scholars like Dr. Hopkins, but by learning English, French, Italian & German, so as to teach & write their own books. Two of these exiles, Akong & Trungpa, visited Prinknash in 1963 just 3½ years after leaving Tibet & founded the senior Tibetan monastery of the West at Sam-ye in Scotland, naming it for the oldest monastery in Tibet founded by Padmasambhava in 749.
This is why it is only now that Catholics & especially Benedictines are beginning to find themselves able to start talking about Buddhism, not from its outer edges, but from its centre, from the essence of its teaching on the spiritual life. Speaking about Buddhism is only a preparation for monastic ecumenism which is speaking with Buddhists, the single aim of which is to understand each other so that each will understand itself more deeply. The possibility of doing this fruitfully would be increased if each were concerned as we are with the salvation of the whole human race, & if each were equally aware of the sacredness implied in the mystery of being a human being. It is exactly these two aspects of Orthodox-Catholic teaching, the VAST & the DEEP, that the West has begun to discover in Mahayana since the coming of Tibetans into exile, & which they too are beginning to discover in our teaching.
We receive the two Tibetans (being sent by the Dalai Lama at our own invitation) in the light of chapters 53 & 61 of the Holy Rule: On Receiving PEREGRINI & On Receiving PEREGRINI MONKS as guests. We remember as Jewish-Catholics our own sojourn in Egypt & our exile in Babylon; we remember as Benedictines the exile so many monasteries have known since the Reformation, the French Revolution &c;, & we remember all this because G-d has told us to do so (Lv 19:34) whenever we meet Peregrini in the Holy Land - so we receive them, as Benedict says, with the verse: Suscepimus Deus misericordiam tuam in medio templi tui, we have received your compassion, Lord, in the inmost part of your temple - the temple that the monastery is as the Domus Dei, the House of G-d, & the temple that each of us is as the temple of the Holy Spirit.
As Bernard says, the monk is one who shews to all others the same compassion he has received by having been led into the true Holy Land of likeness, out of the Egypt of unlikeness.
The study of patristics is imposed on us by St. Benedict: 'what book of the Holy Catholic Fathers does not proclaim LOUDLY the most Direct Way of reaching our Creator?' What led up to Vatican II was the extent to which the Church at large, outside monasteries, took up this teaching of the Holy Fathers on the Direct Way. Whatever the cause, something had happened about the year 1000 AD that made St. Bernard (b. 1090) "the last of the Fathers & first of the scholastics" & started the slow erosion of our Jewish-Catholic comtemplative tradition.
Some have blamed the seculars for relegating contemplation to monasteries, others blame regulars for not instructing seculars - but any historian will know that the way things develop in human society can never be reduced to simple explanations - it's like blaming the monasteries (especially the Benedictines) for the Reformation when the causes are much more complicated, but the end result has been that thousands of young people, mostly Catholic (if the surveys are correct) have been flocking to what the papers call 'eastern cults' in search of what the West has failed to hand on to them in spite of the adage 'contemplata aliis tradere' - handing on to others that which has been contemplated - an adage that is based on the unity of temple & kingdom: as G-d reigns through the human only when the human is a living temple - so the contemplata are manifested to others by the human who turns to the East, to that interior Orient as the Fathers call it in a phrase taken up repeatedly by the Sufis of Islam. The temple surrounds the inmost room that we enter to pray; the kingdom is manifest in the deeds that flow out from that centre.
This unity of what flows out in the kingdom from the centre to which we turn (& which we enter) in prayer is what Christ taught & is the authentic tradition of the Church - to break that unity between turning inward with Mary & outward with Martha is what became inevitable when the active & contemplative lives became separated aspects of the Church which the Middle Ages tried to 'combine' in the so called vita mixta, whereas of course the Holy Spirit, the Lord & Giver of the Church's Life is One. It is this unity of the two lives that Tibetans understand as YOGA which is the same word as 'yoked' in English. The unity between knowing God in contemplation and loving him through compassion for the whole of mankind, the unity that began to wither when scholars began to dismiss as a myth the patristic view that the Church was founded on the monastic life of Christ & the 12 who were 1st called only to 'follow' Him & then called a 2nd time to 'be with Him'. The monastic & contemplative aspect of the Patriarchs & prophets was ignored, & even the word 'monastic', first used by Philo (the exact contemporary of Christ) was misconstrued, the vita contemplativa or bios theoretikos wasn't just hived off into a theological fairy-land until rescued by Abbot Chapman, but even Dom David Knowles fell into the trap of confusing monasticism with something that began with the 4th century. How Vatican II tried to bridge the gulf between academic or seminary theology & the spiritual life of the Church is a major theme of the encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et Vivificantem, that the Pope issued 6 weeks ago in 3 parts, of which the second is the least satisfactory since it ignores everything in the other two parts that doesn't fit in with the Filioquist views of Augustinian Latinism. At least it encourages one to look forward to something better in 15 years time when the 3rd millennium of the Incarnation starts in the year AD 2000. As the Incarnation was almost certainly in the year BC 10-9, exactly 1000 years after the accession of David in BC 1010-1009, the 3rd millennium really begins in 5 years time.
But that is a digression from the main point here which is that the first point of immediate contact with Buddhism is when we see that both Buddhism & the Church are essentially monastic & contemplative religions, both founded on this view of the inseparability of wisdom & compassion, of temple & kingdom. For the Church this is to see the Church as founded by Christ to revive & continue the monastic tradition of the Prophets & the Schools of the Prophets which in his lifetime were represented by the Haburoth, the 'confraternities, associations, koinonias' or 'fellowships' of the Pharisees.
Let me try & put Buddha in a historical perspective that illustrates what I have said in two points:
(a) Our religion, the religion of Christ, is a religion of prophets. St. Peter proclaimed this at Pentecost, the birthday of the Church, when he quoted Moses & Joel in the Upper Room where Christ had celebrated his last Habura Supper. Our religion thus goes back to Abraham our Father in Faith, & from Abraham on, the whole of the Old Testament is written by prophets, & our record of the prophetic life, the life of listening (as Benedict puts it) to the Vox Divina with the ear of the heart, continues up to the last book of the Old Testament which was completed about the time Buddha was preaching in India. In his lifetime fell the Return from Exile & the building of the Second Temple, & the books of Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Obadiah, Job, Ruth & many psalms. The only ones written after the death of Buddha would be Jonah, Tobit, Esther, Ecclesiastes & Ecclesiasticus, & of course Daniel, Maccabees & Wisdom.
(b) The easiest way for Benedictines to remember a precise date is that Benedict was born 480 AD & Buddha died 480 BC, & that both died about the age of 80, which is the age Christ would have been had he lived till the destruction of the temple in AD 70.
I mentioned that the earliest surviving mention of the Buddha by name in a western text is St. Clement of Alexandria. Western knowledge of Indian monasticism goes back at least to Alexander the Great who founded Alexandria & conquered India. Trade contacts between India & the West (especially Alexandria) were fairly continuous till perhaps as late as the time of St. Benedict, & there is nothing improbable in the statement that Pantaenus, the teacher of St. Clement, had been to India, & from the work of Dr. Duncan Derritt we are becoming fairly certain that among the trade goods that went to India were copies of at least the Gospels, either by sea or via Syria. The importance of these contacts should obviously neither be ignored nor exaggerated &, as far as Buddhism is concerned, rather than the influence of the Gospels on certain Indian texts, the importance of this early Christian period is that it is the period when the Mahayana & Theravada traditions of Buddhism grew apart. If, however, when speaking to Tibetans about our own spiritual tradition, we can describe its central & basic characteristics in the same terms that describe the central & basic characteristics of Mahayana Buddhism, we must certainly never imagine that, because of these trade & other contacts, Mahayana is nothing but the influence of our own Judaeo-Christian tradition on Theravada! Where there are points, even central & basic points, where the Patristic tradition, on which Benedict founds the spiritual art to be taught in his School of the Lord's service, coincides with Mahayana tradition, it will be far more theological to see these in the light of what used to be called 'natural' theology, in the light of Justin Martyr's teaching on the 'logos spermatikos' & in the light of Providence. About contacts between the descendants of Abraham & the descendants of Buddha we can only speculate, just as we may speculate (as I did in a Paper to St. Benet's Hall in Oxford) on Abraham & Buddha having a common ancestor in the palaeolithic & neolithic spirituality of the shaman.
If the monastic character of Judaeo-Christian & of Buddhist spirituality is the 1st & outermost point of contact, with, for the Church, this element of union between kingdom & temple, we must, for the sake of the Buddhist peregrini, be able to pinpoint a bit more precisely what it is that we consider the central, the fundamental teaching of our own scriptural & patristic theology.
(a) We are made in the image and likeness of G-d &, however much that likeness is lost, through the cardinal sin of pride or egotism, no human being anywhere in the world, at any time in human history, can stop being the image of G-d, for this image is 'chiefly in the soul or MIND because mind is spirit'. This image that we are is the basis of salvation which consists in & depends on that likeness to G-d being restored. All progress in improving that likeness is progress in theosis, in our divinization or deification & such progress is possible only through what Benedict calls the LUMEN DEIFICUM or deifying Light. It was so that we might come to share His Divine Nature that Christ came to share our human nature.
(b) If our likeness to G-d is lost through selfishness, pride, egotism, self-love, or EROS, then it is regained by the transformation of that eros into universal, altruistic, other-love or AGAPE which is charity, giving, selflessness & that APATHEIA which St. John Cassian translates as PURITY OF HEART, the bliss, beatitude or reward of which is that the pure of heart shall enjoy the contemplation or vision of G-d.
(c) This 'purity' of heart is what Benedict calls 'humilitas' & other writers our 'nothingness' or 'emptiness'; what scripture & Cassian & Catholic tradition mean by 'heart' is not only mind in general, but the heart of the mind; not just the activity of discursive prayer but the stillness at the heart of all mental activity like the centre of a wheel which remains still whether the wheel is turning or not, & without which the wheel would not be able to turn. It is the centre through which G-d reigns to the extent that it is the temple of the Holy Spirit. It is this centre that makes possible the unity of Kingdom & Temple, able to survive the Throne of David & the Temple of Solomon, & it is this unity which is the essence of the Good News or Gospel preached by Christ &, we must never forget, accepted by all Orthodox Jews after AD 70, though that is part of the narrower ecumenical dialogue with our elder brethren.
(d) Christ specifically calls it the Good News of the Kingdom of G-d, & makes His Advent depend on teshuva, metanoia, what Benedict calls 'conversio', i.e., "turning" - so often mistranslated as 'repentance' which is only one aspect of conversio or turning. Conversio is turning to G-d, liturgically to His Presence in the temple, spiritually to His Presence in the heart-of-the-mind which is his image & the living temple that we are. The whole point of the New or re-newed Covenant foretold by Jeremiah & Ezechiel & established by Christ at the Last Haburah Supper & in His Death & Resurrection (& proclaimed at Mass) is that the Torah, Logos or Word that G-d had inscribed on stone for Moses to keep in the tent or temple was identical with the Torah, Logos or Word equally inscribed by G-d on the heart of the mind of every human being, & what is inscribed there is the very nature of what the heart of our mind is.
To "read" the word inscribed on stone in the stone temple the High Priest must "lift"* the veil; to "read" the same word inscribed on the heart of the mind in the living temple requires what scripture calls circumcision of heart, without which there is no pure heart - which is the one sacrifice G-d requires since, whatever other sacrifices we offer in the temple, they are of things G-d created & doesn't need, whereas egotism is one thing G-d didn't create, it is what sullies & veils the heart of our mind & prevents us from seeing G-d in His Image & Word which are the heart of mind & its nature.
* Actually there were 2 veils & he went in between them, so "lift" isn't quite the word. Also the loss of the inscribed stones meant the Holy of Holies was EMPTY, yet this EMPTINESS still taught the Truth of TORAH.
Conversio in the Rule is this circumcision of heart, this reading the word written within so that G-d actually becomes our Teacher (as Christ, Ezechiel & Jeremiah said); it is turning the mind to read the heart of the mind, & what Antony meant by 'unless you know yourself, you cannot know G-d'.
The two great Commandments written on both the stone-tablet & the living-heart are to love G-d & to love our neighbour - but the mystery of being a human being lies in the paradox that no one can begin to obey these two commands EXCEPT by beginning from the selfish desire for personal holiness. WE want to obey the command of G-d to be holy as He is Holy, because WE want to obey, WE want to be holy. There simply is nothing WE can do to transform our SELVES from our own SELFISH desire to be UNselfish. Hence the Fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa, talk of rising by Eros to meet Agape on its way to meet us: as Dom Sebastian Moore put it in a letter I got just before setting out for TALACRE, it is the point where egotism, the sense of our own ASEITAS, of being self-made, begins to crumble. It is agape, altruistic other-love, that purifies the heart-of-mind & makes possible the vision of G-d who IS Agape. And this vision of G-d begins when we see G-d in all things & in all people, & are able to love & forgive them as G-d loves & forgives us. Loving & forgiving others we already share in the nature of G-d who IS Love; not asserting our own selfish love, we allow G-d to love them through us, & this is the beginning of G-d's kingdom or reign through us.
(e) Everything that exists is the image of G-d & proclaims its creator by proclaiming itself as other than its creator, as not being un-created, as being empty of ASEITAS which is the one most useful essential Latin word we have that makes IMMEDIATE sense to the Buddhist who asserts that all things are empty of being self-begotten.
Since G-d alone is uncreated, then G-d alone IS; all things that exist merely share in G-d's being by way of becoming. We ourselves & everything else have existed "from all eternity" in G-d's mind as possibilities & 'becoming' is nothing but the passage from 'possible' to 'actual' effected by G-d's Will.
To us that means that anything which appears, anything that can be seized by hand or mind, is creature & not Creator: if there is something we know, it isn't G-d, & G-d is that which can only be known as unknowable. The first glimpse of G-d's unknowability is seen in its image which is the human mind. Mind being self-luminous knows that it is & that it is one, but, if mind turns to mind, it discovers mind only by its inability to discover it, just as a hand cannot grasp itself or an eye see itself. My novice-master, Dom Raphael Dixon-Davies, thought every novice should have experienced this within 6 months of entering the novitiate. It is the 1st step of con-versio, of turning mind to the heart-of-mind & reading there its nature, which is to be invisible to itself - & thus the invisible image of the invisible G-d. Unless you know yourself, said Antony, you cannot know G-d.
(f) G-d Alone IS, He Alone is His own Knowledge of Himself, & this Concept of Himself is the Creative Word, the Logos Who IS the Perfect Ikon of the Father through Whom the Father created all things. Every proclamation of the Father by created things is the Voice of that Word. Since it IS spoken IN Silence, the Holy Spirit is sent to every prophet so that he can "hear" that silent voice, translate it into human speech, & translate it into human life as the Life of a saint, which is the Kingdom of the Father through the Spirit templed in the human.
Every awareness of the Unity of G-d through the unity of creation is the Word of the Father made perceptible to mind by the Spirit. This is what Justin Martyr means by the logos spermatikos, this is why there is no such thing as 'natural' theology, this is why every religion founded on these truths is a participation to some extent or other in the religion of the Word who is the Truth in the Light of which mind is able to judge what is true. Science is possible because all things are created by the Logos & are logical & available to study since creation is uniformly empty of Aseitas, of 'self-creation', of 'non-becoming'. Nor does this provide only the basis of science, it also provides the basis for the teaching on 'baptism of desire', of G-d's offering grace (His Self-Gift, the Gift of the Divine Selfhood) to all people in so far as they respond to Truth & in so far as they respond through ignorance to what they imagine to be the Truth. Hence, all pagans who are saved, are saved by Christ through fidelity either to their own religion, or to their substitute for religion.
G-d does not withold grace till we FIND, till we DISCOVER Truth; G-d gives it to those who SEEK, who SEARCH for truth. This is why Benedict accepts as a monk the novice who is 'truly seeking G-d'. The Benedictine is one who spends his life in this search for G-d, within the framework of the Holy Rule that is set before us as a mere introduction to what the Scriptures & Fathers teach on 'the most Direct Way of reaching our Creator'.
But since the Church teaches the POSSIBILITY of salvation by Christ through a false (& even a cruel) religion, the Church must also assert the need for true religion to be revealed, i.e., for G-d to reveal G-d to man. This God does, not merely through the Incarnation of the Word Who IS the Truth that G-d IS (what Aquinas called the 'First Truth' or Prima Veritas), but through every truth that we assent to, & even through every error that we assent to under the mistaken impression that it is a truth. This is because it is only in the Light of the First Truth that we judge if a thing is true or not. And, of course, it is this 'Light' of the First Truth that is the Lumen Deificum.
(g) If every truth, including that of the nature of our own mind, is the Presence of Christ the Eternal Word of G-d, & if every understood truth is understood through the Presence in us of the Holy Spirit, then in the case of a religion like that of Buddhism, which is a religion founded on the search for truth as revealed through the nature of human mind (of the 'image of the first truth' as we put it) & on the avoidance of all hatred, but especially in the case of a religion like MAHAYANA Buddhism that is founded not only on search for truth & avoiding hatred...
(h) but on the practice of LOVE-&-COMPASSION for the whole human race, then Catholic theology allows expressly for the possibility that G-d has inspired the great Buddhist teachers, that Buddhism is a prophetic religion that is led by the Holy Spirit to LISTEN to that Silent Word of G-d uttered in the silence of the heart of every human mind & to TRANSLATE that Silent Word into human speech & human deeds, adapted to the society & culture in which that religion is being lived for the purpose of TRANSFORMING that society.
(j) What I have called the union of Temple & Kingdom (the essence of the Gospel) is this double turning UPWARD (or inward) to G-d in contemplation of truth & turning OUTWARD to others in charity-&-compassion, so that the lumen deificum shines out to others in the active life of a saint. It is this shining 'out' of the lumen that shines 'in' which is symbolised as a HALO both in Buddhist art & in Catholic art.
(k) What it symbolises in Catholic theology we have now looked at in a Catholic monastic Benedictine terminology that I think will be near enough to the language of the Tibetan peregrini for them to be able to understand what we are saying as, in obedience to Benedict, we 'read the Law of G-d' (the Torah written on the nature of mind) to our guests, in whom we are to worship the Presence of Christ. But Benedict warns us against the delusions of the evil one who can turn up in the guise of unknown strangers. For this reason we must know something about the religion of these peregrini before they arrive to hear the Torah read to them, & this we can do because they come from the Dalai Lama who is very far from being an unknown stranger monk, & whose writings on Buddhism are extensive, profound & available to all of us.
Part I was meant to be an attempt at seeing if a coherent outline of our Catholic contemplative tradition could be given in terms a Buddhist is likely to understand, but that is very different from a coherent outline of the Buddhist contemplative tradition in terms that we can understand.
Buddhists have certainly begun to make this effort & it would be presumptuous for a Catholic to try & do it for them. Nevertheless dialogue is mutual & we must be prepared not only to explain our tradition in their terms but try to understand them in our terms.
In 1965 the Dalai Lama produced a simple short text An Introduction to Buddhism which I shall try to follow as a basis for this second half.
0. PRELIMINARY - BODHI means enlightenment & a Buddha is a human being enlightened by TRUTH. To us, truth is that Prima Veritas in the light of which we judge truths & its light is that LUMEN DEIFICUM to which Benedict asks us to open the inner eye at the heart of our mind. This is why I have tried to emphasise that our common teaching on LIGHT has to be the base for mutual understanding. On our part it means meditating on why Genesis begins with 'Let there be Light', why Benedict begins the Rule with Deifying Light, why Christ is called LUX MUNDI & LUMEN GENTIUM. We can even ask why Dante structures the Divine Comedy on the metaphysics of light, & why modern science takes the speed of light as its basic fact. It's why I've used HALOES in the title.
1. SUTRAS & TANTRAS - The Dalai Lama says all Buddhas teach SUTRAS which are the TRUTHS to be known by all, but the last Buddha (the Buddha) not only taught SUTRAS to both the Hinayana (Lesser-Vehicle) & Maha-yana (Great-Vehicle) followers of his, but also taught the TANTRAS to the Mahayanist followers. These set out the many different METHODS we can use for coming to know & contemplate truth in wisdom & how to unite that wisdom with a life of charity & compassion for others. For us this is the same union of knowledge & love, & our preparation for understanding the Buddhist teaching is to understand the DIFFERENCES between the Dominicans & the Franciscans in what they teach about the Beatific Vision. The visit of the Tibetans may even help us to understand more deeply how Benedict saw the connection which he makes in a single sentence linking the Lumen Deificum by which the opened eye has the vision of G-d, & the astonishment or wonder with which the opened ear listens to the Vox Divina that singles out the operarius or workman from to crowd, to work for him in the world.
2. THE SCRIPTURES IN TIBET - Tibetan Buddhism being Mahayana, the scriptures there are organised under the 2 headings of SUTRA & TANTRA:
Vinaya - the rule of monastic life, morality
Sautantra - contemplation
Abhidharma - metaphysics
Kriya - tantra (outer)
Carya - tantra (outer & inner)
Yoga - tantra (inner)
Highest Yoga - tantra (unifying outer & inner)
(a) Mahayoga
(b) Anuyoga
(c) Ati yoga a "gradation of inwardness" (Guenther)
We must remember that YOGA or UNION is a union between truth & love, between contemplation & charity, between MARY & MARTHA, between FAITH & WORKS. The union between "the Word, the True Light that enlightens all human beings" & "Let your light so shine before all". How can we unite the act of looking up to G-d (Sursum corda at the beginning of Mass, i.e., of the Canon, the Beraka) & the act of looking outward to the rest of the human race that we are to love & serve (the reason we are 'sent out' at the Ite Missa Est)? How do we unite the two great Commandments regarding G-d & our neighbour?
It is a mistake to limit the word 'yoga' to the contemplative half of these two sides of the coin: to limit 'yoga' to 'union with G-d'. Benedict deals with yoga in the proper sense when he gets to the 12th degree of humility: not only in the heart, but in our exterior, we are to shew our emptiness, i.e., humilitas. The inner union with truth is carried from choir out of the monastery into garden, road & field where it is seen as charity-compassion & preferring others to oneself.
In our own Benedictine traditon this union or yoga of inner & outer is not a matter of doing two things at once, as if loving G-d AND loving our neighbour were separate activities. "By the exercise of charity alone can the divine light be kindled... The measure of charity is our measure of divine light." (Augustine Baker, 1.2.6.7.8)
Only the METHOD of loving our neighbour can help us to love G-d & (through that love of our neighbour who is the image of G-d) reach the WISDOM of knowing truth through our emptiness (or humilitas or 'creatureliness'). This is TANTRA in Catholic terms, this is HIGHEST YOGA TANTRA in Catholic terms. Only through emptiness can the light shine in, only through emptiness (more accurately, EMPTINESS AND CESSATION) can the light shine out, & this is the one basic fundamental reason why it is possible to 'compare the colours of Buddhist & Catholic haloes'.
The meaning of the word TANTRA is too complicated to go into: the same root gives us words like tent & maintain & tenter-hook, but in Tibet the etymology of the form tantra is taken as 'integration & continuity' (two ideas that we see linked if we ask what is the unity of a river). For our purpose the most helpful insight is in a remark made by kLong-Chen (1308-1363): "TANTRA is the great mystery of the Presence of RIGPA (of prophetic inner awareness) at the heart of the mind, as well as the Way in which this Presence operates in all that we do." Baker, too, talks of MIND's own Stream & swift Course toward G-d. Here we can remember a remark of St. Basil: "Their mind fixed on G-d, everything the Apostles did was their ceaseless prayer."
3. THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS -
SAMSARA (suffering) - This is the bondage we suffer through selfishness & attachment to things. It is why Paul says that being raised with Christ we must have our minds fixed on the things that are sursum (above). Either we are slaves of the world or slaves of the truth. In St. Bernard's theology 'the suffering a Benedictine experiences when he finds himself in the land of unlikeness & the compassion G-d shews by leading him into the land of likeness, is the reason we shew compassion to others'.
KARMA (cause of suffering) - The cause of suffering can be reduced to the 2 delusions of passion & hate: 'passion' is the same as our monastic term pathe & means attachment to things, to people & to self: it is called 'delusion' because we are deluded by things (Baker's secondary objects) that exist in a state of becoming & decay (the things 'that moth & rust corrupt') & fail to realise that they are empty of that true lasting being which (to us) only G-d is. As the Dalai Lama says (Tantra 1.193) 'suffering or sorrow is the afflictions & the chief of these is a concept of inherent existence'. As to the question of karma carried over from one life to another, the simplest remark is that for Catholics, rebirth is never into this world but into PURGATORY. At this point or level Catholic & Buddhist speak the same language & the question of rebirth into this world must be left over to a different sort of ecumenical dialogue at a different sort of level. For the moment we can be happy with describing karma or cause of suffering as failure to distinguish between the two truths, about which more later on.
NIRVANA (slowly reaching the total cessation of egotism & suffering) - Nirvana, says the Dalai Lama, is liberation from Samsara, but it is NOT the 'cessation of being; a Buddha continues to have consciousness & a spiritual body free from delusion'. This, of course, is very different from what most popular European books imagine Nirvana to be. In Tibet the word Nirvana can be used in TWO ways: (i) as NATURAL NIRVANA (svabhavanirvana) which is merely the absence from anything of Aseitas, & this isn't an actual Nirvana; (ii) the only actual Nirvana is true cessation of karma & Samsara. (i) EMPTINESS is a fact that merely needs to be realised; (ii) CESSATION is a life-time's work. These are the only two ultimate truths. Liberation is a negative description & peace is a more positive description, i.e., it isn't just 'absence of war' in the ordinary Latin sense of pax, but PAX in the Benedictine sense of SHALOM, the Peace that passes understanding. As liberation it is the reason why Benedict requires the end of the Lord's Prayer to be said aloud: et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo (the best translation of the obvious Semitic original is to take not-into as one phrase, & 'lead us out-of temptation into freedom from evil' or 'from the evil one'), which in the embolism at Mass is amplified into 'free us from every evil... grant us Peace.'
In our monastic tradition we can remember the emphasis put on freedom in the school of Alexandria & its description of deification by the Lumen as a Union of Two Freedoms, which Augustine Baker renders in his famous phrase as the Union of nothing & Nothing.
In Tibetan monastic tradition the essential foundation for this freedom or peace is understanding the two truths that we shall look at later: here let me put it this way, that if anything exists, then it is true that it exists & we can say that it is, but it is also true to say that it is empty of Aseitas & only exists by way of becoming. The word is should strictly be reserved for G-d, so we are more accurate to say 'G-d, & G-d alone, is; things exist'. The Creator is, creatures exist. For Augustine Baker, G-d is Nothing because G-d is not a thing; we are nothing because we are empty of Aseitas. Because of this, we can talk of the two truths best by understanding what is meant by FUGA MUNDI: we do not flee from creation to the Creator, as (being part of creation) we can never escape it - we fly THROUGH creation to G-d, i.e., by that proclamation of the truth that is made by all the truths that exist - in our monastic literature this is everything that is taught under the heading of THEOPHANY or (in the older English word it would be a pity to lose) TIFFANY - it is the elementary distinction between kataphatic & apophatic theology - it is the distinction between the world that G-d so loved & the world that we lump together with the devil & all his pomps.
It is worth going on a bit about the two truths as they are so absolutely fundamental to ANY understanding of Mahayana monasticism & are equally fundamental to Catholicism & the Gospel under names more familiar to us - & yet, there is nothing easier than to slip into treating things & oneself as though they were not in a state of mere becoming, as though they were not TEMPORAL - in the Rule Benedict emphasises this again & again - the DAILY view of death - the HOURLY guard over ones deeds - the ETERNAL life to be desired with all spritual concupiscence. To understand the two truths is to understand why Buddhism is called the MIDDLE WAY: (a) not denying that things are; (b) not claiming that they are in any sense other than becoming - in Catholic philosophy this is how things participate in the Being of G-d & why creation of things is no addition to the Being that G-d IS.
4. PATH - 'The true path is the method by which we arrive at true cessation': the two main schools of thought regarding this path are:
The differences between Hina- & Maha-yana are:
The chief distinction of the Mahayana path is following the 6 VIRTUES & following them to PERFECTION; these are the 6 PARAMITAS:
All 6 are comprehended in GIVING or SURRENDER since even not clinging to self is a giving, a sacrifice (& even the sacrifice of a pure heart).
I can't remember why these 6 precisely & only are listed (later lists omit Samadhi & add 5 others: renunciation, determination, truthfulness, friendliness & equanimity = a total of 10) but they call for no special Benedictine comment - except the division into 5 & 1; into 'outward' & 'upward'; into the 5 'virtues' plus the truth of 'doctrine' - here we remember the very last line of Benedict's Rule: "G-d protecting, we arrive at the CULMEN, the culmination of DOCTRINE-&-VIRTUE". Here Benedict once again links the TWO TRUTHS & the 2 sides of his Ladder.
TWO BRANCHES OF MAHAYANA - All the above is common to both branches of Mahayana: By itself it is the branch of PERFECTION or SUTRA Mahayana; the other & higher branch is TANTRA or SECRET MANTRA Mahayana. Secret because practised in private, as Christ said: 'Enter & shut the door - practise without trumpets'; Mantra in the sense of MIND PROTECTION, which is identical with our tradition of GUARD OF THE HEART (Nepsis), which ultimately is 'G-d protecting us, we arrive &c;', i.e., only through having mind fixed on G-d can we practise the virtues with true altruistic mind at the 12th degree of humilitas without deluding ourselves into thinking we are being unselfish, & this always is the ceaseless prayer of true apostles.
TANTRA has all that is in SUTRA, but the difference is that Tantra adds 'doing' yoga, medi(t)ations on ones own body AS IF it were the body of a Buddha or Saint practising true selfless charity to all others sine ullo labore & velut naturaliter, because charity flows from truth, i.e., humilitas.
Here a full commentary on the Tantra Path would mean the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ - & why we can see the beggar to whom we give the water as Christ - why what is done to a follower of Christ is done to Christ - why those who hear you, hear me - this is the doctrine of 'having the mind of Christ' - of 'doing for My sake' by acting 'in the person of Christ', as at one level the priest does offering the Sacrifice.
Awareness that we are the Body of Christ, the Temple of His Spirit. Hence, the difference between our gross mortal bodies & the subtle glorified body in the Resurrection.
BENEDICT & TIBET - As Christ taught Mahayana, fulfilling all the prophecies to Abraham on the many for whose sake the revelations were made - & sending his disciples to all nations &c;, then dialogue between Benedictines & Mahayana traditions is more natural & much easier than dialogue with Hinayana countries.
Of the 4 philosophical systems or 'schools of tenets':
:...........................................(b) PRASANGIKA...
It is the PRASANGIKA that is most fully in harmony with our Catholic way of thinking.
As TIBET is the Mahayana country in which Prasangika is held to be the 'cream of philosophy', it is with Tibetan monks that we can begin dialogue with a sense of FAMILY - especially if they follow the TANTRA & not just the SUTRA...
Especially if they are trained in HIGHEST YOGA TANTRA & the union of DOCTRINA VIRTUTUMQUE as the way to the HEIGHTS of that union (CULMINA) in the PATRIA that we reach DEO PROTEGENTE - "protected by that of which all things are empty" & which therefore, being known only as unknowable, can never appear TO mind in any sort of image, since MIND ITSELF is the image of that of which all things, including MIND, are empty.
There is truth we SEE & there is FIRST TRUTH (Prima Veritas) by the light of which we see the truths we see, & know them to be true, & thus to participate in FIRST TRUTH - i.e., truths are never in addition to FIRST TRUTH, but are its manifestation to us. "TRUTH IS ONE WITHOUT A SECOND... TRUTH ISN'T MANY & THE TWO TRUTHS ARE NOT AT VARIANCE." (Sutra: Nipata 884-6)
There is BEING that we attribute to every existent thing we encounter, this is the being common to them all & is minimal being, known by abstracting it from all things we encounter, & indeed so minimal that it is mere becoming: but there is the BEING of FIRST TRUTH which is that IN WHICH the things we encounter participate by way of becoming. But this is put too loosely - the distinction is between being as LESS than Life & BEING as greater than life (Summa Theologiae 1.4.2 ad 5; 21.2.5 ad 2). See the Final Note On The Two Truths, where I have tried to be less clumsy.
As IMAGES of the BEING of this FIRST TRUTH human minds are LUMINOUS & open to that BEING, that TRUTH, that LIGHT, which do not, & cannot APPEAR to mind.
ATI YOGA & CATHOLIC CONTEMPLATION - Mind is luminous by its very nature (as image of G-d), so it can never SEE or KNOW this luminousness, since it IS this luminosity, but in medi(t)ation a stilled-mind becomes aware of it, & can maintain this awareness in subsequent activity.
If mind were NOT luminous (if we were not images of G-d), we could probably know things, but we would never know their emptiness, & so could never be divinised, & would not be immortal.
Such is the state we approach when we are merely BLINDED to this nature of mind by egotism, & are content to judge things (& mind) as true, without judging them empty.
Judging things empty (& mind too, eventually, through the 12 degrees of humilitas) is HOW we conduct the 'search for G-d' (for Aseitas), since this is what leads us to 'finding Aseitas by not finding it' - i.e., it leads us to finding emptinesses & judging them ULTIMATE TRUTHS & hence, BY THIS JUDGEMENT, we become aware of:
which is the "opening of our eye to the Lumen Deificum" that Benedict makes the condition for our hearing (with astonished ears) the VOX DIVINA telling us what to DO, as His workers in the Opus Dei, so that the Lumen shines out in DEEDS (novices are often surprised that the 12th step is the OUTWARD SHOW) - but the RUNGS are what LINK the BODY & MIND sides of the Ladder - the WHOLE LADDER is true YOGA, starting from:
Wisdom is manifest in everything & everywhere sine ullo labore & velut naturaliter - effortlessly & spontaneously! as in Dzogchen - becoming aware that we know FIRST TRUTH as that which is unknowable & this being HIGHEST knowledge of truth is deepest BLISS (beatitude) which, since its base is selflessness & emptiness, we MUST desire for all.
This is how the GOAL is itself what converts eros into agape.
TRUTH & BEATITUDE unite in knowledge & love, & lead to EVER INCREASING agape for all others.
TRUTH is infinite, & MIND being the possibility of knowing truth is the possibility of knowing infinite truth (in Catholic terms, we are CAPAX DEI, though not knowing in infinity, since only G-d can BE G-d's own Infinite Knowledge of Divine Infinite Being), & so we are the possibility of infinite beatitude & also the possibility of infinite agape for all.
CHRIST remains as King till ALL enemies to the salvation of ALL are under His feet, & then only does He hand over the kingdom to the FATHER. This is our 1st glimpse of the Catholic doctrine of the BODHISATTVA of whom there are 3 types:
Even in ATIYOGA the two sides of TRUTH & BEATITUDE still proceed in eternal epectasy: i.e., VISION & BEATITUDE, however closely united in the BEATIFIC VISION, are not STATIC, as in Origen's view of the goal, but move eternally to the static goal (the unknowable essence that IS its knowledge of itself). This inconceivable moving of time into the timeless is the mystery of the divine energies set out by St. Maximus Confessor & St. Gregory Palamas, & is epectasy (toward the never reached static goal which isn't ever reached, because, as Basil (?) says, it is "ever approaching" (sounds more like Gregory Nyssa), & so the "static" goal is also divine energy.
In ATIYOGA, the SEMSSDE refers to mind's VISION of TRUTH; the kLONG-SDE refers to mind's BEATITUDE; the MAN-nGAG-Gi sDE refers to the "static" goal guiding our "eternal" epectasy.
As St. John says, "we shall know as we are known": we are in fact known (by G-d) by G-d knowing G-d's own Divine Essence; we shall Know G-d's Essence by Knowing the Essence after the model provided by the human nature assumed by Christ. More we can hardly say, except that through the Mystical Body, through the Resurrection, we, like Christ, are also, as Benedict says, "heirs of the Kingdom of Heaven".
But here we have moved through death with ATI YOGA into what Benedict calls our native land (our Patria), which is the mind of G-d, the 'cause' of our mind which cannot be the effect of matter, the Mind in which we have the truth that possibilities have since all eternity been present with.
Things which are not have a truth corresponding to their possibility; it is that they potentially exist. And the truth of the possibility that every human has had (as a possibility in the mind of G-d) from all eternity is that of a human mind, i.e., a human possibility of knowing the truth of G-d's unknowable essence, which is the One Truth that G-d IS (& G-d knows Being in the Maximum Way: Summa Theologiae 1,14,9 ad 1) & in which we share, since (as the Buddha said) truth is one & has no second.
Here then in Highest Yoga Tantra (anuttara-yoga-tantra) & especially in its 3rd division of ATI YOGA we do see that it is the SAME LUMEN that illumines the MIND of a Buddha & the mind of a divinised Saint - that their haloes are BOTH the colour of SUNYATA or emptiness or humilitas tinted with BLISS or Beatitude that is only fully complete when Christ "hands over" the Kingdom to the Father - notice Dante on haloes of WHITE light tinged with RED.
"At home" then with Tibetan TANTRIC monks, we need perhaps also to see which of the 4 monastic Orders aiming at anuttarayogatantra we might find ourselves most at home with.
The main distinction is between the Orders that follow the OLD TRANSLATION of the Tantras & those who follow the NEW. The Old or NYINGMA-pa were founded by Padmasambhava who built Sam-ye monastery (749), the 1st in Tibet, where Buddhism had been known & practised by a few pious lay people since 641, or since about 60 years after the death of Benedict. The 1st Tibetan monastery founded after the exile is thus also name Sam-ye, & is in Scotland, & was founded by 2 lamas, Akong & Trungpa, who stayed at Prinknash in 1963, just 3½ years after leaving Tibet.
In 836 began the great persecution of Buddhism in Central Tibet: it survived in the East, but eventually dwindled to two monks (kLumes & Sumpa) after well over 100 years. In 978 (142 years after the suppression) these two returned to Central Tibet from the East.
The NEW translation are mostly grouped into 3 main Orders:
The monasteries for nuns fall into the same groupings.
As with us, each Order has its own different schools of contemplation: of those that I have read about, TWO stand out as particularly in accord with our own Patristic tradition: of the NYINGMA, the school known as DZOGCHEN (also another name for ATI YOGA) or Great Completion; of the KARGYUPTA, the school known as MAHAMUDRA or Great Seal which developed within its Order out of the teachings of the Dzogchen. What unites these two is that each makes use of NON-CONCEPTUAL MEDI(T)ATION in its inner search for the fundamental innate mind of clear light, i.e., for understanding the heart-of-mind.
As the philosophical school of PRASANGIKA is the cream of epistemology, the DZOGCHEN is considered unsurpassed among the methods of medi(t)ation. When the Dalai Lama was last in London, it was these very two he chose to lecture on at the private seminars I attended as a member of the Benedictine committee.
A. True cessation, Nirvana, depends on the two truths: i.e., not denying that conventional truths are conventionally true, but simultaneously cognizing the ultimate truth of their emptiness, &, eventually, unifying this PATH, to use expressions common to ATIYOGA (dzogchen & mahamudra) & to Catholic tradition, on the base that heart-of-mind, that which remains after true cessation, is an ultimate truth & an emptiness, while all its thoughts & mental elaborations are conventional truths.
Hence the possibility of all things being seen in the light of the LUMEN DEIFICUM as Benedict did in his vision of 30 October 540, when he was 60. On this unity of the totality seen in a single ray of light, Gregory the Great comments: However little our minds perceive of the Lumen Deificum, all things appear empty. The effect of the light isn't that the totality is reduced to a size that ordinary mind can take in, but that the capacity of mind itself is enlarged.
B. As in the Our Father, true cessation is liberation from the temptation offered by conventional truth to ignore (& even deny) ultimate truth.
In the temptation of Buddha by MARA, his liberation from that tentatio is symbolised in art by the mudra of his Earth-touching gesture, since the Earth herself witnessed to the truth that we reach the invisible through the visible, & that when we do, the visible remains visible & retains the truth of a conventional truth, though now it is known as empty, & that emptiness is itself an object that appears to us in the way that it really is, i.e., to mind it appears as a vacuity.
In the temptation of Christ by Satan (& later by PETER - vade retro Satana, the incident that gives rise to the CROSS OF St. BENEDICT: nunquam mihi suade vana):
(a) Jesus as eternal High PRIEST is tempted to the selfishness of turning stones into loaves (since G-d has the power to turn stones into sons) whereas his 'true bread is to do the will of Him who sent me', since 'we live not by bread alone, but by the Word of G-od', i.e., the double Commandment on which all else hangs, symbolized by the loaves of the Presence outside the veil of the Holy of Holies. Hence too the link in the Our Father (i.e., the centre of its chiasmic structure) 'on Earth as in Heaven thy will be done - give us today no more than the bread that we need for today only'.
The office of the High Priest was to sacrifice the other set of 12 loaves & the wine daily, as a sign by which he taught the people that the one true food is the perpetual unceasing remembrance of G-d - how we participate in God's remembrance of Himself. This is the office of feeding that Christ also lays on Peter.
(b) Jesus as PROPHET is tempted to jump off the pinnacle of the temple (from which 35 years later his half-brother James was pushed to his death) & fall into the trap of using a prophet's siddhi (powers) of levitation to gain an egotistic popularity, contradicting that egolessness of a prophet (or Buddha) which allows him to lead the minds of others toward illumination.
(c) Jesus as KING is tempted to claim for himself not only the throne of David but the imperial power of Rome, establishing the kingship looked for by so many instead of aiming at the reign of G-d through the pure circumcised heart of mind as living temples.
Thus all 3 temptations of Jesus are based on the two truths, & are overcome by true cessation.
C. Buddha having overcome the temptation of MARA, touches the conventional truth of Earth to establish the Middle Way of the Two Truths (not asserting that matter is the only truth, not asserting that matter doesn't exist at all). He then proceeds to EAT, thus establishing his community (Qahal or Ekklesia or Haburah) or Sangha as the Middle Way between gluttony & excessive asceticism.
So, too, Christ "came eating & drinking", & thus Benedict establishes his own middle way of the Rule that neither lays down anything harsh & rigorous, nor ignores the restrictions dictated by balanced reason (dictante aequitatis ratione) for the emendation of vice & conservation of agape (propter emendationem vitiorum vel conservationem caritatis) which happens to be another point where he shews his understanding of the two truths & of authentic yoga. Or as in chapter 48: 'let all be done with moderation on account of the faint-hearted' (omnia tamen mensurate fiant propter pusillanimes), where 'faint-hearted' is Hunter Blair's quite accurate translation, though pusillanimes are those with 'tiny minds', whose minds have not been enlarged as was Benedict's in the Lumen Deificum, whose hearts have not been enlarged as yet in their progress (dilatato corde). Benedict certainly aims to establish a middle way between the SARABAITS (the wandering ascetics who choose the ascetic practices that they prefer, whereas true asceticism is having altruistic, not egotistic, mind) & the GYROVAGI (who also wander, but are given up to the pleasures & snares of gluttony, visit monasteries for the sake of free food, & are in all things worse than the Sarabaits). That last indicates that Benedict thought the "middle" was a bit nearer the ascetic than the glutton.
Our scholastic middle way, of ANALOGY between UNIVOCATION & EQUIVOCATION, might as well be mentioned here.
D. To prepare ourselves to discuss Old Testament doctrine of EMPTINESS as ULTIMATE TRUTH, the obvious place for English speakers to start from is the unforgettable VANITY, VANITY, ALL IS VANITY, but the Old Testament Hebrew vocabulary for Emptiness or SUNYATA is particularly rich: the following list isn't complete, but each term occurs at least once in each of the Old Testament books.
This is an investigation that I certainly have hardly begun, so I add no details. A particular aspect with Buddhist interest would be to establish the true range of real meanings for TOHU & BOHU (tohu-va-vohu) where Genesis begins (coudn't it mean: 'In the beginning G-d created both heaven & Earth & of these two Earth was empty of emptiness'? Anything empty of things is empty of emptinesses while, since even possibilities are empty of Aseitas, heaven would have been full of emptinesses. This, of course, would be a monastic, not an academic, approach to the question.).
E. THE TWO TRUTHS & G-D - Our Judaeo-Catholic teaching is that by its luminosity, the natural light of living mind is able to know G-d with certainty from the created world (e.g., Ws 13:1-9; Rm 1:18-21; Vatican I; DS nn. 1785, 1806, 2305, 2317).
ALL knowledge had by a living human (irrespective of whether the object known is real or unreal, true or false, actual or possible, accepted or rejected, &c;, &c;,) posits at least ONE REALITY which is its own act, & this is irrespective of whether that act is one of asking, assuming, denying, affirming, mistaking, searching, finding, doubting, even doubting or denying the reality of the act of doubting or denying.
Through this one reality of its own act, any knowledge posits the nature of mind as luminous, as illuminated by the light of First Truth or Being-as-such, i.e., the light of 'that which is'. As it is the antecedent condition that makes possible the act of knowing, being-as-such (of which alone the word IS can properly be used) can never be or become the direct object of the act itself, though its absence can.
Thus even before reflecting on itself, mind is aware of its own nature as the possibility of searching for truth, & of judging between IS & ISN'T; of affirming or denying, of assenting or rejecting. Awareness of this possibility is mind's awareness that, as open to First Truth or Being-as-such, it is the possibility of acquiring knowledge, of transforming possible knowledge into actual knowledge, possible truth into actual truth; this is what constitutes mind's awareness that mind is naturally empty of being-as-such (which is being as empty of all becoming).
Since mind's ability to judge between conventional & ultimate truths comes from this, Being-as-such or First-Truth is called the principium quo. It is this mere FACT OF FROMNESS, mere FACT OF DEPENDENCE that is given the equivocal label of 'cause' or 'creation'.
As the source of all comprehensibility, this principium quo is itself incomprehensible & mysterium; findable only by non-finding. It is this that has its image in the mystery of RIGPA (prophetic awareness) at heart-of-mind. For us this awareness is awareness of that principium quo; of that of which Rigpa is the image, & so of it as BEING, TRUTH & LIFE. These names for G-d are taken from G-d's image, & so must be understood as images of the real names which can only remain unknown to us & can only be represented by clumsier labels like divine-being, divine-truth, divine-life & even so they disguise how in G-d Being Truth & Life must BE One. (Cf Rv 19:12b.13b - "He had a Name inscribed upon Him known to no one but Himself... The name by which He was known was 'the Word of G-d'.")
It is that original mystery of which heart-of-mind ('original mind' or 'original face' in Zen) as living mystery is an actual image & possible likeness; hence, in trinitarian theology, we refer to Original Mystery as that which is its (or her, or his) own life, & is its own living knowledge of itself, & is its own living ultimate truth knowing all possible conventional truths by knowing its own essence as the truth that makes all conventional truths possible, & so makes possible all emptinesses.
This is the Catholic path to true cessation by which we do not become Being Truth & Life, since Being is empty of becoming & so nothing can become Being, but by which we receive its Self-Gift, become like it, share its nature, and are divinised.
This approach to G-d, which is that called 'by excessus', or 'by RIGPA', & it should - because it is the Highest Way - be the 1st way we explain Catholic teaching to Mahayana Buddhists, before they embark on the Lower Way of negative (apophatic) theology, to end on the lowest way of positive (cataphatic) theology. This reverses the order of St. Thomas, who proceeds (like Buddhists) from the lowest & outermost, from conventional truths, to the successive & ascending stages. The reverse direction which I suggest, is made possible by the fact that Buddhists who have reached the innermost in their own terminology, are in a position where it is best for them to work outwards in Catholic terminology.
To any geshe of moderate acuity the essence of the approach 'by excessus' will be obvious, whereas if we drag them UP the slope, as if they were novices starting from scratch (& drag them up in English, which is neither their language nor the language of our scholastic texts & monastic texts, let alone the language of our scriptures), nothing will be familiar, everything will be strange, & BENEDICT'S CULMEN of DOCTRINA VIRTUTUMQUE (which is the point to which they want to be led) will never be reached.
This approach will also give the geshes an insight into why Catholic teaching insists that we use the words 'cause' & 'create' only equivocally, meaning that we do not intend to suggest that 'that of which things are empty' causes or creates either 'the things that are empty' or 'the emptinesses of such things' in the way we cause things or create things. Hebrew is better off, since bara is used ONLY of divine 'causality' & never of human causality.
F. THE TRIKAYA - As our presentation of the TWO TRUTHS is from the PROPHETIC character of their diamond or vajra or unbreakable union in that life to which we are called, I have put them into the terminology of TEMPLE & KINGDOM.
Appended is a rough summary of the TRIKAYA done some years ago, trying to get it all on a typed sheet of A4 - so it should be treated as a hint.
It should be enough to shew how the union of Temple & Kingdom (of Faith & Works might be another useful term) & the union of Dharmakaya & Rupakaya, illustrate each other & through this mutual illumination, help each other to be more deeply understood, & so MORE DEEPLY LIVED, more FRUITFULLY lived, &, by us, in its specifically BENEDICTINE form of the union at the CULMEN of DOCTRINA VIRTUTUMQUE.
It thus becomes the model for the wider ecumenism, between Buddha & Christ, between Tantra & Benedict.
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1a. NATURE TRUTH BODY SVABHAVAKAYA NGO-BO NYID-SKU with DOUBLE PURITY (a) naturally pure as what it is in itself absence of inherent existence (b) adventitiously pure as regards removal of incidental stains the 'naturally pure' as con- tuited by a mind cleansed of the 2 contaminations (i) afflictive obstructions (ii) obstructions to omniscience
1b. WISDOM TRUTH BODY JNANA (DHARMA) KAYA JE SHES (CHOS) KYI SKU original innate wisdom pristine awarness of the nature truth body the vajradhara's mind in continuous meditative equipoise on the expanse of suchness the VERY SUBTLE MIND OF CLEAR LIGHT in the continuum of basic innate mind the Presence of the SELF- LUMINOUSNESS of mind (if nature body is SKY this is SUNLIT-SKY)
2+3 RUPAKAYA FORM BODY GZUGS SKU
ACHIEVED BY METHOD (the PROFOUND)
achieved by
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Cf. I. 1.Temple DHARMAKAYA 2. Faith TRUTH BODY 3.Doctrine CHOS SKU 4. Knowledge The simultaneous ultimacy of what we ARE & of its COGNITIVENESS (cf rational animals) the which (being CONTUITED by RIGPA) is to be manifested in the RUPAKAYA achieved by WISDOM cognising EMPTINESS (the PROFOUND)
II. REALIZATION (ENJOYMENT) BODY SAMBHOGAKAYA LONGS SKU the inner sphere of progressive spiritual life (in its final state) both COGNITIVE & CONATIVE looks up to by prajna-wisdom looks down to by karuna-compassion the interior life in which pristine awareness first has its effect
III. EMANATION (TRANSFORMATION) BODY NIRMANAKAYA SPRUL SKU tulku
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CONCLUSION
They will want to know if (& how) we teach the Four Noble Truths, the Two Truths, True Cessation, Emptiness, the necessity for Bodhicitta & Universal Karuna; Atiyoga, & the Trikaya.
Those of us who have never been led to try & understand the Dharma, will be wanting to know if they Believe in G-d, in the Soul, in Creation, in Heaven; in faith & hope & the greatest of these which is Charity; in Grace, in Forgiveness & Immortality.
This double paper has set out to offer preliminary answers to both sets of questions.
Appendix: A QUOTATION FROM KARL RAHNER -
RIGPA (what I call 'prophetic awareness') is often referred to in monastic spirituality as 'EXCESSUS'.
Hence BENJAMIN (since in the Vulgate he is said to be IN EXCESSU MENTIS) is a Patristic type of CONTEMPLATION.
Rahner translates EXCESSUS as 'the Pre-Apprehension (Vorgriff) & specifically uses it for the 'Pre-Apprehension' of BEING & KNOWING as ORIGINAL UNITY in BEING-PRESENT-TO-ITSELF (Beisichsein).
In Spirit In The World (1968 translation of 1939 Geist in Welt published 19391 19572) he writes (p. 186 - my adaptation): "Since RIGPA, i.e., the EXCESSUS or pre-apprehension attains to the Esse of absolute negative infinity [as opposed to mere private infinity - cf. Baker: 'G-d this infinite nothing'], therefore man is SPIRIT. Since it is in the absolutely unlimited breadth of RIGPA only that we all have this absolute negative infinity always in ourself, therefore man is FINITE SPIRIT, & we cannot represent or objectify this infinite in our concretizing thought (in our SEMS). So, we know of absolute negative infinity only insofar as, in RIGPA, i.e., in the pre-apprehension, we experience ourself surpassing all of our knowledge, & so, too, it is in RIGPA, in EXCESSU, in the pre-apprehension that man is called (by St. Thomas) QUODAMMODO OMNIA (in a certain way everything)."
In short: (a) we are spirit because we know of absolute esse; (b) we experience our finiteness (our EMPTINESS) in the fact that we know of absolute esse in this way only.
Addenda:
1. I have just spotted another clumsiness in my presentation which could seriously confuse a Tibetan. As it stands, the argument seems to run -
Whereas,
Hence, we have to insert another term:
Cf. ibn'Arabi:
2. That we are able to analyse everything whatsoever & discover it empty of inherent existence (Aseitas) means that we already know enough to NAME that of which all things are empty & call it 'inherent existence' or 'Aseitas'. This we learn from anything that appears as 'other than empty', i.e., the name we give ultimate truths ('emptiness of Aseitas') we learn from conventional truths.
This is what we make the foundation of: (a) our positive, kataphatic, analogical knowledge of G-d, which is the middle way betweens (x) univocity & (y) equivocity, & which needs correction by (b) negative, apophatic theology per modum remotionis, which needs further correction by (c) the knowledge we have in the EXCESSUS per modum excellentiae.
So the full middle way is:
& it is only the FULLNESS of this middle way that we should be alluding to by the term THEOPHANY (or TIFFANY): cf. COUNCIL IV LATERAN 1215 (DS n. 432) - "Every similarity between Creator & creature implies a far greater dissimilarity between the two."
3. A FURTHER QUOTATION ADAPTED FROM RAHNER (Theological Dictionary under 'Truth'): In the primordial (pristine in Buddhist terms) awareness a knower has of himself, TRUTH is the INNER LUMINOSITY of mind to itself, & this is such that (a) this LUMINOSITY (which mind cannot grasp in objective concepts) is involved in every act of cognition & entails THE UNTHEMATIC EXPERIENCE of spirit's (of rigpa's) own transcendence; (b) this TRUTH being one (since it is contained in all truths & can't be one truth among many, i.e., can't be a truth that could be added to any total of known truths) entails THE UNTHEMATIC AWARENESS (in rigpa) of that abyss of mystery which is the ground of all being.
By the act of RECEIVING this ONE TRUTH to which we are thus 'open', it embraces us; it FREES US FROM OUR SELF; it makes us true.
By the act of ACCEPTING our own transcendence (which is the act always elevated by G-d's universal salvific will) we accept our orientation to G-d as "G-d of eternal life disclosing the Divine Selfhood in Self-Communication", i.e. (Jn 14:6) our ordination TO TRUTH ABSOLUTELY.
This is the absolutely luminous possession FROM WITHIN of that infinite fullness of Being which bestows itself as Gift in the BEATIFIC VISION. This (in Rahner's presentation) is the Catholic doctrine of TRUE CESSATION, of NIRVANA & of BUDDHAHOOD or HIGHEST STAGE NIRVANA.
4. 'The first glimpse of Christ as a Bodhissatva...' This I left hanging undeveloped in the air.
A. The 1st glimpse is Christ as not handing over the Kingdom till all enemies to truth are under His feet after the General Judgment.
B. The fuller perspective includes the assistance afforded by the dead to each other & to the living, & by the living to the dead & to each other, in the COMMUNION OF SAINTS (the "Ecclesia ab ABEL" - Congar) including angels, & to those outside.
This needs to be considered from the point of view that distinguishes:
(ii) suffering,
(ii) after the General Judgment.
Where this assistance is offered across the boundary between time & the timeless, a number of well known problems arise, including that of what we mean by a distinction between the Particular & General Judgments.
This assistance includes all prayers & intercessions, all thoughts, words & deeds of compassion in mind, speech & body, offered at each stage of the path (lam or Via) of epectasy, whether this path reaches an ultimate (Origen) or is ultimateless (Gregory of Nyssa) or both (myself):
the via purgatoria - on Earth & in purgatory,
illuminativa - on Earth & in purgatory & in Patria,
unitiva - on Earth & in purgatory & in Patria.
For the sake of completion one needs some distinction between the ORDINARY & the EXTRAORDINARY mutual assistance in the Communion of Saints, but for the latter we can offer the Tibetans little that is adequate theologically, other than 2 works by Benedictines that someone ought to bring up to date, since they have the particular value of being based on a sound understanding of the two types of puritas cordis (natural & adventitious) & so on the way MIND relates to HEART-of-MIND: Abbot Alois Wiesinger OCR's Occult Phenomena in the Light of Theology (1957, translated by Brian Battershaw from the post-1950 German original), and Father Mager OSB's Mystik als Lehre und Leben (1934).
I shall thus largely ignore the extraordinary, & so must at least mention here its importance for dialogue with Tibetans, & for our full understanding of the Triyaka & for their fuller understanding of popular devotions to angelic, Marian & other apparitions: those of Michael & other archangels who never had bodies; of Christ & the Blessed Virgin Mary whose bodies are glorified, of saints whose nirmana-kayas or apparitional-bodies are of various sorts including that of St. Germanus seen by St. Benedict in 540 as a sphere of light. The apparitions of Our Lady to non-Catholics might be of special importance, e.g., to the Tamils of Sri Lanka at Madhu, to Muslims recently in Cairo (& even more recently in a church near there). The problematic bodies of Enoch & Elijah, the Carmelite theology of their Feast of Elijah's crucifixion at his future return, Elijah's return in the body of John the Baptist; the comparability of the 'Globe of Light' & the 'Chariot of Fire', & the comparability of the nirmana-kayas in which Moses & Elijah appeared at the Transfiguration, the belief in the Assumption of Moses after death (like Our Lady), &, balancing that, of Elijah before death (like Henoch). The apparitions of saints not yet dead & their levitations &c; extend a field that used to be attractive to theologians, & seems rather to have gone out of favour (to the benefit of Colin Wilson?).
I shall limit myself here to some notes on the ORDINARY assistance afforded the living by the intercession of the dead both in Purgatory & in Patria (but avoiding the rich theology of the word 'Patria' & the 'Temple in Heaven'). In each case terminology & concepts familiar (enough) to Tibetans are offered by Rahner: this is because MIND & HEART-of-MIND are the same everywhere for all human beings, but most theologians (unlike Aquinas, Cajetan, Rahner) relegate the distinction to footnotes, much as Tibetans (other than His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself, & Nyingma writers) relegate the distinction between SEMS & RIGPA as SEMS-NYD. Many of our own older monastic theologians prefer to call it the distinction between INTELLIGENTIA & INTELLECTUS, or between ANIMA & ANIMUS (very confusing to present-day Jungians), or simply (like St. Paul) between PSYCHE & NOUS, NEFESH & RUACH (nafs & ruh to Sufis). Weisinger used "body-soul" & "spirit-soul"; others have Soul & Soul-ground (or spark or point).
The value of citing Rahner is: (a) his thought dominated Vatican II - nothing he had written before the Council needed correction after it; (b) he was (as far as I know) TOTALLY ignorant about Buddhist teaching, so where his thought does harmonise with Mahayana we have a base for the wider ecumenism that is both AUTHENTIC & ORTHODOX.
The demerits of citing Rahner are: (a) his impossible terminology & existential 'clarity' (exactly as bad as Guenther's translations from Tibetan); (b) the awful hash the printer made of Spirit In The World; & (c) worst of all, Rahner's ineradicable Latinist mentality.
PURGATORY - Only one who is perfected (by death & purgatory) is capable of the Beatific Vision, & is so before the perfection (consummation) of the 'world'.
This inner perfecting is a temporal progress (on the path, Via, lam) in genuine creaturely 'interior' time, & it is temporal in so far as it relates to the many levels of human nature which establish the phases or stages by which each human becomes the 'one' that each fundamentally is.
This progress: (i) depends on correct decisions, especially the decisive act of faith-contrition-love; (ii) encounters at each of these levels the 'pre-personal' resistance we have built up by earlier faults & wrong decisions.
THE EXPERIENCE OF THIS RESISTANCE IS SUFFERING &, being a consequence of wrong decision, is called 'punishment', but, being distinct from the fulfilling of freedom & from the experience of the 'core' (i.e., RIGPA) of the human person, it is also called 'external punishment' & 'real penal suffering'.
The difference between this process of integration now & in purgatory is that after death, we not only enlist every level against that resistance, but are supported in doing so by the grace accepted in the correct decision, & it necessarily issues without fail in our perfection which is the Beatific Vision (the Bliss of seeing Truth).
Since the doctrine of purgatory balances the Buddhist doctrine of progress through (the last few) rebirths, the way Rahner has presented it should make sense to the Tibetans.
In so far as purgatory is PROGRESS (even if to us it might seem instantaneous, which would still allow it to take place in 'genuinely creaturely time') & in so far as all progress can be measured, its measure is that of decrease in egotism & increase in love-&-compassion for others, thus according with the saying of Bernard on suffering leading to compassion.
Such progress being decrease in suffering & increase in bliss, it is progress toward the Beatific Vision, away from confusion & toward clarity, & so it is an increase in beatitude as well as in vision ('the joys of purgatory').
It is thus a decrease in that inability to know our wants which Aquinas emphasises as the reason the Church never prays liturgically to the souls in purgatory, even collectively, though this is a pious custom & authorised devotion.
The assistance offered us (& to each other) by the Holy Souls (because they are holy) is taught by Bellarmine, Suarez, Alphonsus & Gasparri.
Progress in purgatory is thus progress through the stages or levels of a Bodhisattva (the 10 grounds of a Bodhisattva which are the perfections in the later list of 10 as opposed to the earlier list of 6 - cf supra).
As such it can also be seen as the steps of ever closer prophetic union between Temple & Kingdom.
IN PATRIA -
A. Pending the General Judgment the deified (Mary & the saints) who enjoy the Beatific Vision help, by their intercession, both: (i) the Holy Souls in purgatory, (ii) ourselves on Earth (Teresa's shower of roses, of lotuses to Buddhists: one grows out of thorns, the other out of mud).
In this respect we could: (a) regard all saints (& Holy souls) between the two judgments as Bodhisattvas, & all saints as Buddhas only after the General Resurrection & Judgment. Their joy, as the Body of Christ, in accepting the delay till Christ 'hands over the Kingdom' would thus be the equivalent of the Bodhisattva vow. Of the 3 types of Bodhisattva (Shepherd, Boatman, King) it is significant that Jeffrey Hopkins in 1982, translating Khetsun Sangpo Tantric Practice in Nyingma, said (p.129) said: "that of KING is weakest, that of SHEPHERD is unparalleled"; in 1985, introducing the Kalcakra Tantra (p. 15), he wrote: "the KING-like motivation is said in Tibetan tradition to be the only realistic mode, since there is no state superior to BUDDHAHOOD for accomplishing others' welfare, & that it is an 'exaggerated statement expressing the greatness of their altruistic SHEPHERD-like motivation' to describe Bodhisattvas as 'putting-off final enlightenment as Buddhas in order to be of greater service to sentient beings'. (b) regard all saints (including Mary) as Buddhas 'already' in so far as they enjoy the Beatific Vision, but as Bodhisattvas in so far as they assist us whether by their ordinary perpetual intercession or in less ordinary apparitional ways. This, which seems to me the better Catholic view is thus, according to Jeffrey Hopkins, also the better Tibetan view.
B. Whichever view turns out to be the most helpful in explaining to Tibetans our doctrine on the Communion of Saints (the assembly of all the Buddhas), we need to have for them some fuller explanation of our teaching on the Beatific Vision in which the Buddhas or saints are assembled, & that will mean explaining not only the 'vision' & the 'bliss', but also the unbreakable (vajra, diamond, adamantine) union between them (in details this would mean explaining the union between all 8 Beatitudes & their rewards).
BEATIFIC VISION - On this one can again find useful terminology in Rahner (Theological Dictionary). The primal ('pristine') notion of knowledge, antecedent to any intentional reaching out of subject to object, is the PRESENCE OF MIND TO ITSELF AS INNER CLARITY (this exactly is 'Rigpa').
It is this pristine knowledge (not the 'subject-&-object knowledge') that alone can help us to explain the Beatific Vision, for that is 'the perfect actualising of what a human is', & so it is mind's (i.e., Rigpa's) transparency to the absolute clarity of G-d, i.e. of Prima Veritas.
Though even in ordinary empirical knowing (that of 'subject & object') the unity of knower & known is not the result of knowledge, since knowledge is what results from that union (we know an object only after it & the knower have become entitatively one as a consequence of the adequation of the being of the knower to the being of the object, through the species) such cannot be the case in the Beatific Vision, since, as creature, any modification in us (even due to G-d's creative power, & however intrinsic) will always be something created, finite & so 'empty' &, therefore, unable to mediate the DIRECT VISION of the uncreated, the infinite & the non-empty.
THUS IT IS THAT, IN THE BEATIFIC VISION, THE REALITY OF THE MIND OF THE KNOWER IS THE BEING OF VERITAS PRIMA ITSELF.
This relationship of G-d to mind-as-knower cannot be classified in the category of efficient causality (the production of something external to the cause) - it is a formal causality acting on the heart-of-mind (i.e., on RIGPA), which is to say it is an intro-duction into the source, not a pro-duction from the source.
What there is of the created in the Beatific Vision is that which DISPOSES the heart-of-mind (Rigpa) to receiving the formal causality of G-d's uncreated, infinite, non-empty Being; it is this that we call the LUMEN GLORIAE, the seed of which is present already in us & which (since it is something created) is something that can grow.
St. Thomas (CG
3.53) in coming to know G-d in the Beatific Vision the change is not
in G-d but in the created mind acquiring a new DISPOSITION: this is
called LUMEN GLORIAE not
because it makes some object actually intelligible, but because it
makes the intellect powerful enough to understand... (3.54) the
Prima Veritas isn't beyond
the capacity of human mind as foreign to it (in the way sound is
foreign to the object of vision), it is, on the contrary, the very
first intelligible object & the principle of all intellectual
cognition. Prima Veritas
merely exceeds the power of created intellect,
which thus needs (& can receive) strengthening by the
Lumen Deificum
- Shalom & Welcome! - 
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