A Brief Reflection on The Calf of Samaria

I continue my reflection on the theme of forgetfulness in the surah Ta Ha.  After telling the story of exodus, we have another scenery of forgetfulness and the necessity of remembrance: the story of Samaria’s golden calf:

"[God said], ‘Moses, what has made you come ahead of your people in such haste?’ [Moses had left his people in the charge of Aaron to contemplate on Mount Sinai.] and he said, ‘They are following in my footsteps. I rushed to You, Lord, to please You,’ but God said, ‘We have tested your people in your absence: the Samiri has led them astray.’ Moses returned to his people, angry and aggrieved. He said, ‘My people, did your Lord not make you a gracious promise? Was my absence too long for you? Did you want anger to fall on you from your Lord and so broke your word to me?’ They said, ‘We did not break our word to you deliberately. We were burdened with the weight of people’s jewelry, so we threw it [into the fire], and the Samiri did the same,’ but he [used the molten jewelry to] produce an image of a calf which made a lowing sound, and they said, ‘This is your god and Moses’ god, but he has forgotten.’ Did they not see that [the calf] gave them no answer, that it had no power to harm or benefit them? Aaron did say to them, ‘My people, this calf is a test for you. Your true Lord is the Lord of Mercy, so follow me and obey my orders,’ but they replied, ‘We shall not give up our devotion to it until Moses returns to us.’” (20:83-91)

It is strange that we can’t hold onto the imageless God.  And we constantly forget.  Not strange that through scriptures—words, not idols—God constantly reminds us to remember the ineffable and invisible God.  The horizon of human understanding is bound to what appears to senses.  The history of monotheism is the unbending insistence, advice, prohibition, persuasion, premonition, and warning not to pray the sun, the moon, the earth, and the sky, to what appears to senses, not worship the phenomenal world.  Repeatedly and unflinchingly, religions of the Book remind us to worship the ineffable and invisible God.  It is difficult for human beings, and they constantly fashion something tangible, an image, a statue, their own self and thinking power or one of their own creations such as Golden Calf of scientism, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, genes, artificial intelligence, or technology as their God. 

It seems obvious that we are inclined to worship something visual like a statue or image.  Some justify this image-worshiping as the place in which the divine is present.  But the whole point is that this attachment to the near is also the source of our falling astray.  Historical training of our soul by God through scriptures is to teach us to see the farthest as the nearest, and the invisible and seemingly imperceptible as the most real and true source of worship.  The reason is that epistemically (in terms of knowledge) and ontologically (in terms of being) and ethically (in terms of how to conduct our lives) this liberation from “image”, and seeing gods and goddesses as a trap or delusion, is both true and essential.

We all know now that to take what is the nearest, for example seeming autonomy of the self, or to take our sense data as the most real in a reductive sense is fallacious.  We know now that we are wired into the biosphere of the earth suspended in the universe.  We know that our own self is only understandable within concentric relations with others, environment, and indeed with universe.  We have learned to see the farthest horizon of existence, the universe and Being, as real as the earth, and in terms of priority and sustainability in time, the universe precedes our existence here.  And that which gives, as Being and God, while they themselves are not a being, not a thing in the world, give rise to the world.  We and our earth are a drop of water in the ocean of existence.  Religiously speaking the self is constituted by the divine.  This is a non-reductive approach in which the self is not reducible to environment, nor is the environment-universe-God reducible to the self.

Ethically, to worship any idol or image ensnares us into sense data.  The point is to release ourselves form parochial centrality of the self.  In discussing Confucianism, Huston Smith states: "As for the increase of this heart-mind that is hsin (empathy-sympathy), it expands in concentric circles that begin with oneself and spread from there to include successively one's family, one's face to face community, one's nation, and finally all humanity. In shifting the center of one's empathic concern from oneself to one's family one transcends selfishness. The move from family to community transcends nepotism. The move from community to nation overcomes parochialism, and the move to all humanity counters chauvinistic nationalism."

["It has never been clearer that the country's best self is a global inheritance, its worse a parochial self-certainty." Jedediah Purdy, New Your Times Book Review, 22 Feb. 2009.

Nepotism: "The term comes from Italian word nepotismo, which is based on Latin root nepos meaning nephew. Since the Middle Ages and until the late 17th century, some Catholic popes and bishops, who had taken vows of chastity, and therefore usually had no legitimate offspring of their own, gave their nephews such positions of preference as were often accorded by fathers to son. Several popes elevated nephews and other relatives to the cardinalate. Often, such appointments were a means of continuing a papal "dynasty". For instance, Pope Callixtus III, head of the Borgia family, made two of his nephews cardinals; one of them, Rodrigo, later used his position as a cardinal as a stepping stone to the papacy, becoming Pope Alexander VI. Alexander then elevated Alessandro Farnese, his mistress's brother, to cardinal; Farnese would later go on to become Pope Paul III. Paul also engaged in nepotism, appointing, for instance, two nephews, aged 14 and 16, as cardinals. The practice was finally ended when Pope Innocent XII issued the bull Romanum decet Pontificem, in 1692. The papal bull prohibited popes in all times from bestowing estates, offices, or revenues on any relative, with the exception that one qualified relative (at most) could be made a cardinal." (Widepedia)

"Chauvinism, in its original meaning, is an exaggerated patriotism and a belligerent belief in national superiority and glory. According to legend, French soldier Nicolas Chauvin was badly wounded in the Napoleonic wars. He received a pension for his injuries but it was not enough to live on. After Napoleon abdicated, Chauvin was a fanatical Bonapartist despite the unpopularity of this view in Bourbon Restoration France. His single-minded blind devotion to his cause, despite neglect by his faction and harassment by its enemies, started the use of the term. By extension, it has come to include an extreme and unreasoning partisanship on behalf of any group to which one belongs, especially when the partisanship includes malice and hatred towards rival groups. Jingoism is the British parallel form of this French word, but its meaning has not expanded beyond nationalism in the same way that the word chauvinism has. A contemporary use of the term in English is in the phrase male chauvinism." (Wikepedia)]

Now in the age of Trump’s nepotism, parochialism, chauvinism, and Breitbart’s Steven Bannon’s religious bigotry and hatred, disregard for environment, and white nationalism against people of color, it has become more and more clear to us that worshiping our own nation, race, or even religion excessively is dangerous and a sign of idolatry.  If I disconnect from others and call my own immediate family, race, and nation better than others, ethically I am falling.  Not only it is shortsighted, but practically it is dangerous and self-destructive.  If I see my religion-Islam—as the best in the sense that forcefully I wish to convert others to it, I am falling.  Because Islam first and foremost is based on discussion and entering the hearts of people—if we understand what is the point of sending a scripture, the Quran, to us as a warning and guidance.  We are learning more and more to create a community of religions based on their common perennial ground, when we love and listen to others, others will listen to us.  Self-defense is different from cruelty and authoritarianism. 

As well, when I prioritize profit and self-interest of my country or multinational corporations, my regard and care about other species and environments will diminish because they will be seen as externalities.  I will be entrapped into the nearest, my immediate interest.  Ironically, we know now this self-centeredness is self-destructive.  Our excess is self-destructive, our disconnect from other nations is self-destructive, our disconnect from other races is self-destructive, our alienation from our own labor and nature is self-destructive, disregard for women is self-destructive, and being irreverent towards other perennial religions is ruinous to our own religion.  Satan enters through the door of excess.

Historically, we have been learning to move from the self—to the steep path of liberating slaves, overcoming racism and misogyny, reconciliation with nature, to long for our source in the universe and to arrive squarely to the message of Abrahamic religions that we should not worship what is the nearest and closest to our senses but seemingly the farthest and invisible God—who is in fact the nearest and the most real.  Now we understand better the anti-idolatry message of religions of the Book as a conceptual-ontological leap in remembering God and refraining from worshiping different variations of the golden calves in oblivion.

“In this way We relate to you [Prophet] stories of what happened before. We have given you a Quran from Us.  Whoever turns away from it will bear on the Day of Resurrection a heavy burden and will remain under it. What a terrible burden to carry on that Day!  When the trumpet is sounded and We gather the sinful, sightless, they will murmur to one another, ‘You stayed only ten days [on earth]’–We know best what they say– but the more perceptive of them will say, ‘Your stay [on earth] was only a single day.’

They ask you [Prophet] about the mountains: say, ‘[On that Day] my Lord will blast them into dust and leave a flat plain, with no peak or trough to be seen.  On that Day, people will follow the summoner from whom there is no escape; every voice will be hushed for the Lord of Mercy; only whispers will be heard.  On that Day, intercession will be useless except from those to whom the Lord of Mercy has granted permission and whose words He approves– He knows what is before and behind them, though they do not comprehend Him– and [all] faces will be humbled before the Living, Ever Watchful One. Those burdened with evil deeds will despair, but whoever has done righteous deeds and believed need have no fear of injustice or deprivation.’  We have sent the Quran down in the Arabic tongue and given all kinds of warnings in it, so that they may beware or take heed– exalted be God, the one who is truly in control.” (20:99-114)

A Brief Reflection on Idolatry

The surah The Cave in the Quran comes to end with the story of Dhu ’l-Qarnayn and Gog and Magog.  Dhu ’l-Qarnayn is a prophet-king who helps people and follows God’s commands in different ways.  The last thing he does is to help the people living between two valleys, whose language no one understands, to defend themselves against an aggressive people, Gog and Magog, by building an iron barrier between them.  The Quran predicts that the destruction of this barrier is the sign of the coming of the Hour of Judgment:

“Their enemies could not scale the barrier, nor could they pierce it, and he said, ‘This is a mercy from my Lord. But when my Lord’s promise is fulfilled, He will raze this barrier to the ground: my Lord’s promise always comes true. On that Day, We shall let them surge against each other like waves and then the Trumpet will be blown and We shall gather them all together.  We shall show Hell to the disbelievers, those whose eyes were blind to My signs, those who were unable to hear. Did they think that they could take My servants as masters instead of Me? We have prepared Hell as the disbelievers’ resting place.” (18:97-103)

For the ears who can’t hear the “word” punishment as the effect of disbelief in God, the message above and below, at the end of surah The Cave is difficult to bear.  Only those who have reflected long (and I am just a novice) can have a clear understanding of monotheistic message.  Why did the God of monotheism insists that we shouldn’t worship any imaginary god, goddesses, idols, or humans, or in turn, turn the God of monotheism into a revengeful idol in religious bigotry?  Where does the danger reside?

Turning Monotheistic God into an Idol

“Control of the heavens and earth belongs to God; God has power over everything. There truly are signs in the creation of the heavens and earth, and in the alternation of night and day, for those with understanding, who remember God standing, sitting, and lying down, who reflect on the creation of the heavens and earth: ‘Our Lord! You have not created all this without purpose– You are far above that!– so protect us from the torment of the Fire. Our Lord! You will truly humiliate those You commit to the Fire. The evildoers have no one to help them. Our Lord! We have heard someone calling us to faith–“Believe in your Lord”– and we have believed. Our Lord! Forgive us our sins, wipe out our bad deeds, and grant that we join the righteous when we die. Our Lord! Bestow upon us all that You have promised us through Your messengers– do not humiliate us on the Day of Resurrection– You never break Your promise.’ Their Lord has answered them: ‘I will not allow the deeds of any one of you to be lost, whether you are male or female, each is like the other [in rewards]. I will certainly wipe out the bad deeds of those who emigrated and were driven out of their homes, who suffered harm for My cause, who fought and were killed. I will certainly admit them to Gardens graced with flowing streams, as a reward from God: the best reward is with God.’” (3:189-195)  

Let’s start from the idolatry of seemingly monotheistic rigidification and reification of God as a jealous possessive revengeful God, the one who punishes whoever doesn’t bow down to God’s might.  The ramification of this idolatry is cruelty.  But is God cruel?  All the surhs in the Quran, except for one, starts with “in the name of God, the most merciful, the giver of mercy”—and mercy is the attribute of the chosen in the Quran, those who let go of eye for eye and retribution and forgive:

“Who speaks better than someone who calls people to God, does what is right, and says, ‘I am one of those devoted to God’? Good and evil cannot be equal. [Prophet], repel evil with what is better and your enemy will become as close as an old and valued friend, but only those who are steadfast in patience, only those who are blessed with great righteousness, will attain to such goodness. If a prompting from Satan should stir you, seek refuge with God: He is the All Hearing and the All Knowing.” (41:33-36)

If we read the Quran closely, we see that ethically God repeatedly prioritizes forgiveness to qesas (lex talianis, eye for eye):

“Far better and more lasting is what God will give to those who believe and trust in their Lord; who shun great sins and gross indecencies; who forgive when they are angry; respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them; and defend themselves when they are oppressed. Let harm be requited by an equal harm, though anyone who forgives and puts things right will have his reward from God Himself—He does not like those who do wrong. There is no cause to act against anyone who defends himself after being wronged, but there is cause to act against those who oppress people and transgress in the land against all justice—they will have an agonizing torment—though if a person is patient and forgives, this is one of the greatest things.” (42: 36-43)

The point of monotheism is revelation.  Scriptures are not man-made guess work and assumptions, though with divine grace, we should be able to recognize where they might be manipulated by human whims, as God will help us to purify our hearts and our scriptures from distortion.  Because inside human heart and intuition is a divine measure and scale that can distinguish the real from the fake, and the divine from man-made.  Not strange then, that Judaism, Christianity, and Islamic scriptures were validated by and cultivated billions.  And each scripture and prophet came to rectify some excesses and distortions in the previous one.  Mohammad said he was the last prophet, and after him we had so many false prophets but none of them last, because we might lose our way for a while, but eventually we can discern fictitious from authentic.

The revelation of God consists of one major point: don’t create an idol for yourself out of anything, any object, any other creature, imaginary or real, but only worship the ineffable invisible God.  Why this insistence?  We needed thousands of years of wars and genocides to understand this message.  When the wall of identity disconnected us from mercy and we lost our way from penetrating the hearts to religious wars and bigotry, when we were trapped in the idolatry of zealous identity to undo faith through faith, we resorted to what ought to be the last as the first, to hostility and a system of exclusion and wars without due process.  This was the idolatry of distortion of scriptures themselves, undoing a faith through the faith. 

As I said before, this is the idolatry of reducing monotheistic God to a revengeful God.  But God could punish and destroy Adam and Satan in a blink of eye after they disobeyed.  Why did God not do that?  Why did God give us respite and thousands of years of scriptures and growth to teach us to understand our internal connection to God?  After all, if God is merely forcefully punishing us for our insubordination, what is the purpose of creation? 

“He created the heavens and earth for a true purpose; He wraps the night around the day and the day around the night; He has subjected the sun and moon to run their courses for an appointed time; He is truly the Mighty, the Forgiving.” (39:5)

God has a purpose and it is clear if we just think straight and, on the one hand, let go of the false assumption that we are purposeless and accidental bubbles who, self-contradictorily, are self-grounding ground [bubble] of our existence.  And on the other, reflect on the fact that all religions of the Book tell us that God brought us to the earth to “test” us—indeed to “teach” us, otherwise God’s omniscience already knows the outcome of the test.  Understanding this point helps us to overcome religious bigotry and intolerance and irreverent hostility in the name of religion: a non-idolized God is forgiving and a teacher.  When we turn the ineffable and invisible God of wisdom and mercy into a tyrant, we turn monotheistic God into an idol.  God has created us for a reason and despite our weakness and shortsightedness, God sees the sparkle of growth and divinity that God sowed in us, and asked Satan (Iblis) to bow down to it.  God teaches us to cultivate this seed in us:

“It was not without purpose that We created the heavens and the earth and everything in between. That may be what the disbelievers assume– how they will suffer from the Fire!– but would We treat those who believe and do good deeds and those who spread corruption on earth as equal? Would We treat those who are aware of God and those who recklessly break all bounds in the same way? This is a blessed Scripture which We sent down to you [Muhammad], for people to think about its messages, and for those with understanding to take heed.” (38:27-29)

The logic of punishment and heaven and hell is this losing the chance of growth and awakening from the barren idolatry of images and following our unbridled desires in worshipping false gods and goddesses, or on the contrary, connecting to the source of our existence and bringing fruits of unity in our soul, body, and heart, in our thoughts, words, and deeds and pray for unity-with/belonging-to God, to the invisible horizon of all of events, the source of peace and power:

“[People], do you not see how God has made what is in the heavens and on the earth useful to you, and has lavished His blessings on you both outwardly and inwardly? Yet some people argue about God, without knowledge or guidance or an illuminating scripture. When they are told, ‘Follow what God has sent down,’ they say: ‘We shall follow what we saw our forefathers following.’ What! Even if Satan is calling them to the suffering of the Blazing Flame? Whoever directs himself [his face] wholly to God and does good work has grasped the surest handhold, for the outcome of everything is with God. As for those who refuse to do this, do not let their refusal sadden you [Prophet]– they will return to Us and We shall tell them what they have done: God knows all that hearts contain.” (31: 20-23) 

 The Idolatry of Worshipping Images and Humans

The other variation of idolatry is the idolatry of fictitious whims of gods and goddesses without any valid scriptural pathos, ethos, and logos, unbridled and hedonistic, with an empty veneer of sentimentality and “love”—this nature-shaman or goddess worship has been in the air for the whole history of human beings up to now.  Then the idolatry of worshiping saints and prophets, or kings and the powerful, the plutocrats and bourgeoisie, commodity fetishism and principle of pleasure, honor, nation, or wealth took hold on us.  We had wars for nationalistic chauvinism, capitalism by our scientism and technological advance, or creating heaven on the earth in the name of dialectical materialism of Marxism.  I was one of them.  When I had the chance to ponder the meaning of a life and death under the worshipping of “matter” and “human consciousness and sciences”—an oxymoron—nauseatingly I woke up from my slumber.  A world of contingency.  To be a bubble of accidental interaction of particles.  Taking human self-consciousness as the groundless ground of self-worshipping autonomous self, like ouroboros. What a nihilistic horror!  This is the punishment for those who forget the poverty of their existence and dependent origination in God.  Like a canceric cell, I was rebellious to establish heaven on earth in the delusion of absolute autonomy and self-sufficiency.  Humanity had to come on its knees to understand the need, the existential necessity and poverty, to worship God. 

Similar to religions, Western Enlightenment, is a double sword.  When religion loses its balance and turns into fanaticism and fundamentalism, it acts against its principles.  By the excess in which evil takes over the gaze that sees evil all around itself, the good turns into evil.  Western Enlightenment as well had a wonderful lesson for humanity: look at yourself and the world with an open eye and trust your reason to make sense of the world.  Religious bigotry and excess pushed Western Enlightenment to the other extreme and the effect has been the emergence of idolatry of scientism and worshipping of “autonomous subject”—a strange meaningless metaphysical take, as if our reasoning per se can ground itself. 

This has been the dream of twentieth century philosophy and sciences.   Around the midst of century to our time, philosophy gave up the dream of grounding logic in mathematics, or mathematics in logic, or to make language strictly logical or to solve all metaphysical questions by logical positivism or by elucidation of language.  On the contrary, philosophies such as Heidegger’s phenomenology basically problematized the whole Western tradition of philosophy and its subjectivism and reductionist attitude—its Cartesian assumption that “intellect” or “thinking” is prior to “being”.  Postmodernism pushed this direction to its excessive point and in rejecting autonomous subject and the centrality of consciousness and “I”, declared the death of subject and reduced human self into “discourses” of knowledge or savoir, the text, or relations of power and class wars.

Now we are living in the last phase of idolatry of scientism and different golden calves of sociobiology and psychological and biological evolutionary theory and the worshiping of “genes”: the key to all human puzzles!  This is the time of “self-creation” of technological advance, genetic engineering, cloning, and microchips.  Heidegger had predicted this stage as "Enframing ['Gestell'] means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological." ("Question Concerning Technology") In another word, our scientism and technological advance at the disposal of idolatry of worshipping human sciences turned humans into robots, objectified animals and forests into “resources”, and took us to mass extinction through the instrumentalization of the world.  The sciences that potentially could save us now are destroying us because of our idolatry.  Now the Quran’s consistent message that we ought not to worship anything but God makes a lot of sense.  In another article on divine punishment, I wrote:

“Through disconnection of the ethical from God and the heaven, we fall into variations of hedonism and humanism, at best. Our modern ears can’t substitute anything else for the contingency of our lives. If there is only this world and no necessary divine Law governs our lives, if we are the result of random selections and genes, then survival is the only clue to ethics, now egotistic, then altruistic, no matter what, the telos (aim=purpose) and the kernel of this ethical behavior is pleasure or Nietzsche’s will-to-power at the disposal of survival or again in a circular way at the disposal of Nietzsche’s will-to-power.

We might manage to develop the seemingly best practical reason and live long. What we lose is the meaning of life. Life as such has no universal meaning for any modernist and postmodernist, from Chomsky to Foucault. This loss of meaning, no matter how well and long we live registers itself in our body and soul. This is a common-sense clue: our body is extremely receptive to the world, biosphere, rays of light, drops of water, and intractable rays and particles. A major difference between us, human beings, and other living beings is that we “think”, and what we think, the way we think, the way we perceive our existence in the world, the way we act based on seeing ourselves contingent (accidental) or essential, it all affect our psychosomatic disposition in minute details. If I see myself as merely a natural animal and a contingent bubble in the universe, the internal and external arrangement of my cells and the actions emanating from them--which are mutually cause and effect of my self-interpretation—will be qualitatively different from a person who believes one’s ethical comportment is related to the spiritual realm and God. In this context, “punishment” follows the law of karma. For God, punishment is not retribution and revenge, but the effect of our own actions.  And as the Quran repeatedly asserts, through our own belief and good actions we can repel evil and reverse the law of karma.”

In the penultimate paragraph in the surah The Cave, God says:

 

“Say [Prophet], ‘Shall we [This ‘we’ presumably refers to the Prophet and his community of believers.] tell you who has the most to lose by their actions, whose efforts in this world are misguided, even when they think they are doing good work? It is those who disbelieve in their Lord’s messages and deny that they will meet Him.’ Their deeds come to nothing: on the Day of Resurrection We shall give them no weight. Their recompense for having disbelieved and made fun of My messages and My messengers will be Hell. But those who believe and do good deeds will be given the Gardens of Paradise. There they will remain, never wishing to leave.” (18:97-108)

I end this reflection with my thesis on idolatry in Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, and leave its elaboration to another reflection.

In Hinduism, we have verses in Vedas and Upanishads that are revelatory; however, distortion and excess turned this revelation into having 33 gods or 330 million gods all manifestation of one Godhead.  This variation of idolatry, even if in its philosophical dimension it holds to non-duality of God and the universe and the self--which is itself fallacious--ends up to the same confusion and suffering as other variations of idolatry.  

The quest is to stay in the zone of God’s revelation, not human conjectures.  According to revelations, we belong to the imageless, invisible, ineffable creative awareness who transcends the limits of thoughts, as God is the originator of the universe, living beings, and consciousness, not identical to any one of them.  There is no becoming and being in God.  Our human vocabulary of essence and existence can’t fathom it.  Nor is it the inertia of Dao or dark matter or dark energy or impersonal and unaware origin of universe.  God converses with us through scriptures and guides us.  God is the creator and the teacher.

Taking the Buddha or Confucius or Lao Tzu as gods or worshipping them is another version of idolatry.  It is famous that Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism don’t believe in the creative God.  However, none of them in their original sense declared to be a god or have any access to anything beyond phenomenal world, except for Lao Tzu who in poetic words talks about an impersonal source of all beings as Dao.  Lao Tzu and Confucius relate their ethical practices to Tien or Heaven but never elaborate clearly what Tien is.

  

Buddha never declares there is no creative God.  He was silent about the source of life.  He admitted that his philosophy is a meditative-spiritual technique to overcome suffering. 

In Zen Keys, Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:

“The Buddha always told his disciples not to waste their time and energy in metaphysical speculation. Whenever he was asked a metaphysical question, he remained silent. Instead, he directed his disciples toward practical efforts. Questioned one day about the problem of the infinity of the world, the Buddha said, "Whether the world is finite or infinite, limited or unlimited, the problem of your liberation remains the same." Another time he said, "Suppose a man is struck by a poisoned arrow and the doctor wishes to take out the arrow immediately. Suppose the man does not want the arrow removed until he knows who shot it, his age, his parents, and why he shot it. What would happen? If he were to wait until all these questions have been answered, the man might die first." Life is so short. It must not be spent in endless metaphysical speculation that does not bring us any closer to the truth.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_Poisoned_Arrow

My thesis about Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Buddha is that they were sages whose ethical practices were inspired by divine wisdom but they were not prophets and never could exceed phenomenal world in their explanation of the world.  What makes so much sense to us in Lao Tzu, Confucius, and Buddha is their acute observation and interpretation of the phenomenal world and their ethical connection to the divine.  But it is utterly misleading if we forget that phenomenal world is only the tip of iceberg.  The world of revelation reveals worlds beyond our observation and perception and tell us the truth about the universe, ourselves, our ethical comport, and connects us to our origin, that which we can’t grasp by our own wits.

“Say [Prophet], ‘If the whole ocean were ink for writing the words of my Lord, it would run dry before those words were exhausted’– even if We were to add another ocean to it.  Say, ‘I am only a human being, like you, to whom it has been revealed that your God is One. Anyone who fears [Or ‘expect’ (one of the meanings of yarjuna)] to meet his Lord should do good deeds and give no one a share in the worship due to his Lord.” (18:109-110)