Well, I think we're on the time. Let me welcome all of you to
the Ingersoll Lecture, which is, in this year, a
very special occasion because this also happens
to be the 50th anniversary year of the admission of
women to Harvard Divinity School, something that we're
celebrating with our lectures throughout the year. And this lecture, which is one
of the older lecture endowments at Harvard-- dating from 1893-- is the first of our
named lectures this year that will also be devoted to
honoring this 50th anniversary year. I think it's interesting that
the original bequest, which amounted to $5,000 in 1893,
before 20th century inflation, was made by Miss
Caroline Haskell Ingersoll from her
own estate in honor of her father, George
Goldthwaite Ingersoll, who is a Harvard alumnus. And she stipulated
that the lecture not form part of the
usual college course and was not to be delivered by
any professor or tutor as part of his usual routine
of instruction. So this was clearly to
be something special. The Ingersoll, then titled
On the Immortality of Man-- that's when man was still the
generic designation for human beings-- was to be given once a year
on the model of the Dudleian lecture. The choice of the
lecture was not to be restricted to any one
denomination or profession. Miss Ingersoll further
directed that the lecture should be made available
to the public, gratis, in written form. Another woman, Mary S. Lauber,
later increased the endowment by a bequest of her own. And I should note
that the roster of distinguished speakers is
very long, stretching back to the late 1890s, and
includes William James, who was the second Ingersoll
lecturer in 1897, Josiah Royce in 1899, Alfred
North Whitehead in 1941, Howard Thurman in 1947,
Paul Tillich in 1962, Jaroslaw Pelican in 1963. And the first woman
lecturer that we have, at least in the record, is
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, in 1970. In the years since then, eight
other distinguished women scholars have addressed the
topic, Jane I. Smith, Caroline Bynum Walker, Marian Wright
Edelman, Nina Tumarkin, Mary Douglass, Wendy
Doniger, Carol Zaleski, and Ana Marie Schimmel. Karen Armstrong is thus the
10th woman of some 89 Ingersoll lecturers to date. And it's a great pleasure
to have her here tonight. I've enjoyed every
encounter I've had with her, every podium
I've shared with her. It's been nothing
but a pleasure. And I think we can all look
forward to a wonderful lecture tonight. To introduce her,
I'm going to call on a longtime friend
and a distinguished colleague, Professor Diana Eck. Diana? Thank you, Bill. It is a pleasure to introduce
Karen Armstrong this evening. Over the course of
two decades, Karen has written with
great care and insight on a wide range of
religious subjects. She has reflected on her own
experience as a Roman Catholic nun for seven years in Through
the Narrow Gate, published in 1982, and in The Spiral
Staircase, published last year. She has written,
out of the depth of her education at Oxford
in English literature, a book on the English
mystics of the 14th century and her anthology of religious
and poetic experience, called Tongues of Fire. Her first, best known book--
and there are so many best known books now of Karen Armstrong-- is A History of God, the
4,000 year quest of Judaism, Christianity, and
Islam, published in 1993 and on The New
York Times bestseller list for months. That was the
beginning of work that has garnered a wider and
wider reading public-- The Battle for God, a
history of fundamentalism, Holy War, the Crusades and
their impact on today's world, Mohamed, a biography
of the prophet, Islam, a short history,
Jerusalem, one city, three faiths. She has received many awards,
including one from the Muslim Public Affairs Council, for the
public understanding of Islam, and that was before 9/11. I first met Karen in person at
a symposium at which both of us spoke, in February of
2000, where six of us had been pulled
together by Marcus Ford to address the
topic, God at 2000, a daunting and wonderful
weekend, webcast and broadcast to people
across the country from that huge hall at
Oregon State University. The interest was
huge and something that Karen confessed she very
rarely encountered in Britain. Since then, she has fled to the
United States from time to time to visit here in
Cambridge and to lecture to wider and wider audiences
across the United States, where, to her
gratification, people are very, very interested in
the things that she writes. She gave the Tilak Lecture
at Memorial Church in 2001. She has been at the
Faith and Life Forum in Memorial Church
five or six times. In September of
2000, Karen Armstrong was slated to come to
Harvard for a semester as a scholar in
residence, having an opportunity to write and
work quietly in the library. Her ticket was for
September 12 and she did not get here for a couple of weeks. It was wonderful
to be with Karen and learn from
her that semester, but it was not a quiet time. The US needed what very
few were able to provide, a judicious and clear and
critical voice speaking about Islam, thinking with
us about what had happened on 9/11, and its aftermath. As a New York Times
critic put it, Armstrong can simplify
complex ideas, but she is never simplistic. The Spiral Staircase
was published in 2004. It has touched a chord
across the country and garnered many, many reviews. But Karen insists she
never reads reviews. So I'd like to share one with
her, by Rabbi Arthur Wasco, who wrote this. Opening this book
is like sitting down for coffee on a first
date with someone who is interesting and odd. Your conversation becomes
unexpectedly intimate, painful tales of bafflement and
illness, gleaming crystals of self-discovery and joy. By the time you get up from the
table, you have fallen in love. Karen is a self-described
freelance monotheist who has nonetheless
given spiritual guidance to Christians, Jews,
and Muslims alike. Karen is a freelance
scholar and writer whose work is widely read
and studied in the Academy, to be sure, and in the homes
and hearts of many people who read very little
what the rest of us write in the Academy. And it is an honor to have
this great interpreter of the religious currents of our
time with us, Karen Armstrong. Thank you, Diana. It's a great
pleasure to be here, and a real honor to be
giving this lecture, the latest in a line of such
distinguished luminaries. So of course, when
I was invited, I accepted with great
humility and alacrity, even though, at first sight,
the subject wasn't one that immediate-- was on the
top list of my favorite issues, immortality. Because I'd always
considered immortality simply in connection with
the afterlife. And I have to say that
it's safe to say, I think, that as a child, my religious
life was completely ruined by the notion of the afterlife. The whole religious
struggle seemed to me to be about getting into
heaven and by squeaking in by the skin of your teeth. As a Catholic child
at a convent school, I was taught about
original sin very early. I knew what were the
conditions of mortal sin and it seemed perilously
easy to commit these things. And I was honestly convulsed
with the fear of hell. I just did not see how I was
ever going to get into heaven. And I even resorted to
these desperate measures of wearing a scapular of
the Sacred Heart upon it and making the first
Friday devotions. The story went that if you
went, on the first Friday of every month for nine
consecutive months, to mass and communion,
you were guaranteed the chance of confessing
your sins before you died, at the moment of death. I'm astonished to think
that my school was teaching me this kind of nonsense,
really, at the same time as they were trying to get
me into Oxford and Cambridge. So, that this type of piety-- and I think my experience,
I'm not alone in this-- it was a real
relief for me when I decided that I was just going
to put the afterlife and heaven and hell to one side. Because it often seems
to me this kind of piety seems no more
religious than paying in your monthly installments
into your retirement annuity for a comfortable
life in the hereafter. It also seems slightly
perverse, religiously, because religion is meant
to be about the abandonment of the ego, not about
its eternal survival in optimum conditions. It also breeds, it also
can breed-- not always, by any means-- but this kind of literalistic
belief in an afterlife. It can lead to a kind of
rather unpleasant exclusivity. I sometimes think that if
some people got to heaven and found that everybody was
there, they'd be furious. Because heaven
wouldn't be heaven if you weren't going to
sort of look up at the, over the celestial parapets and
watch the other unfortunates roasting below. Now, in China, in various
some of the Chinese texts of the ancient world that
I've been reading recently, very often, they'll
have a refrain running through the whole
chapter, sort of pulling you back to the central
issue, rather like the refrain of a song. And I'm not going
to do that because I think it would be boring. But if I had a refrain,
a motto for this lecture, it would be this, ego distorts
our vision and limits us. If we can go beyond ego,
we experience immortality. And that's what I want
to talk about tonight. The afterlife is fine. But we've seen, even
yesterday, that it is associated with some of
the most horrendous events of our time, those young men who
believe that they're blasting their way into paradise where
they'll enjoy their 70 virgins. And I don't believe they're
doing these appalling actions because of this. I think this is an
oversimplification. But certainly this
kind of imagery is used in association
with these terrible acts. And then there are the
fantasies of rapture by the Christian
fundamentalists, who believe that before the terrible
tribulation of the last days, they will be snatched into
heaven where they can watch-- this kind of ringside seat-- the sufferings of their enemies
at the hands of anti-Christ, et cetera, and imagining
great, awful massacres at the end of time. So we need, like, not
all religion is good. You can have bad religion as
you have bad art or bad cooking. In fact, religion is
quite hard to do well. And in modern world, we have
some particular difficulties, I think, because of the
preponderance of rationality in our education. We are a culture of logos,
of reason, of science. And we tend, therefore,
to slightly neglect the role of mythos, the other
great way in which people, always in the
pre-modern world, came to a knowledge of the divine. So, part of our
problem is, therefore, that we often think
of our doctrines, our religious
doctrines, or the events of our historical
tradition as though they were diehard historical events. I remember when I
was a young nun being told to write an essay entitled,
"Assess the Historical Evidence for the Resurrection,"
not completely downplaying the whole mythos of the event. Now, the word myth,
in popular parlance, is often used simply to mean
something that isn't true. If a politician is accused of
a peccadillo in his past life, he's likely to say
that it's a myth. It didn't happen. But that's a very
bowdlerized notion of myth. Traditionally, a myth is
something that, in some sense, happened once, but which
also happens all the time. A mythical event is liberated
from the confines of, say, the first century of the common
era, or the seventh century-- the time of
Muhammad-- and lifted, by means of ritual
and ethical practice, into the minds and
hearts of worshippers and the faithful who
are living in very, very different circumstances. And unless, indeed, an event
can be mythologized in this way, it's very difficult to see
how it can be religious. An event can just be a
strange freak, the crossing of the Israelites
over the Sea of Reeds, which is activated each year
in the ritual of the Passover Seder and made a living
reality in the lives of Jews throughout history. It would be just a freak
occurrence of something that would have no relevance
to anybody's interior world. Religion and myth address what
is timeless in human life. A myth is also a
program for action. It is telling us how we
should behave in order to access the
holiness of this event and to make it a
reality in our own lives by a disciplined exercise
of the imagination. And I think here,
too, this is the way I've come to see the
notion of immortality. I don't think immortality is
about an endless succession of moments that will occur after
we throw off this mortal coil. Immortality, like
eternity, is timeless. It is outside the confines
of space and time. And I think this has been a
major theme of religious life, to encounter a
reality that frees you from the constraints
of time and space, that liberates you from the
fear of our mortality, which haunts us so desperately
as human beings. We are the only
animals that have to live with the knowledge
of our mortality. And we've always
found that difficult and have created works
of art and religions in order to come to terms
with our extinction. Now, I may not, as a
child, have been very good at the afterlife. I didn't use that skillfully,
and relinquished it at, you know, at the
first possible moment. But I was very keen on the idea
of transcendence, so much so that I, at the age of 17,
I went off to a convent. It was not a wise decision. But I was, in trying
to make, though, the remote realities of God or
even Jesus a vibrant presence in my own life. I was on the right
lines, I think. Because I think this is
what religion is about. As human beings, we
all seek transcendence. Transcendence has been
a fact of human life. We all have
experiences that seem to touch something deeply
buried within ourselves and lift us momentarily
onto another plane so that we feel, just
for those few moments, that despite all the depressing
evidence to the contrary, life has some ultimate
meaning and value. And some people have
called this ecstasy. Now that doesn't
mean that we are then floating off into an alternative
state of consciousness or freaking out or
going into a trance. Ekstasis means, the
Greek word, stepping out, stepping outside the confines
of our normal experience. We look out for
these experiences when we seem to be
inhabiting our humanity more fully than usual. And if we don't find it
in a church or synagogue or a mosque or a temple any
more, we look for it elsewhere. In my country, as
Diana indicated, the churches are becoming-- are empty. The last time I went
to church in England, there were five of
us there, and a dog. And we were very glad
to have the dog there to swell the audience. And the churches are becoming
warehouses and art galleries, restaurants, and
apartment buildings. The people of Europe, and
especially of Britain, perhaps, are voting
with their feet. They no longer find
ekstasis in these buildings. But they are very
interested in transcendence. They seek it in art, music,
politics, sport, sex, mistakenly in drugs, which
give you a quick ekstasis. Because this is what
human beings do. We are driven to this. And some people seek
to make this ekstasis a permanent reality
in their lives by the disciplined practices
of introspection and prayer. And that's what I want to
talk to you about tonight. Now, if we think of some of the
other doctrines of our faith, I think they're all, when
we get down deep enough to the religious experience,
these various themes of the religious life-- such
as God or say a leading figure like Muhammad or Jesus,
and immortality-- all come down to
very much a core. After all, in heaven,
what are we supposed to imagine ourselves
doing for all eternity but being with God, some would
say being merged with God, encountering God, living
in the presence of God, enjoying the beatific vision. And similarly, it's a
mistake to get too hung up on the historical and factual
aspects of our tradition and neglect the
mythos of them that make them a living
reality in our lives. Take, for example,
the figure of Jesus, who say, in the Greek
Orthodox Church, is a rather Buddha-like figure. The Greek Orthodox don't
really think that Jesus died to save us from our sins. Some say that Adam,
that Jesus would have, God would, in some
sense, have become human even if Adam hadn't sinned. It was part of God's
embrace of humanity. And eventually,
after the Council of Chalcedon and all these
other acrimonious counsels, the Greeks came to
the point of view that Jesus was the first
fully deified human being, that he was so closely
identified with divinity that there was a hair's
breath between him and God. And we can all be like
him, even in this life. One of their favorite
icons of Jesus is on Mount Tabor, when he
is transfigured before them and light comes
from his garments. And he is transfigured humanity,
rather like the Buddha who is pictured sitting
in trance, in ecstasy, in peace and serenity. And it's a very
Buddhist idea, this. Buddhists would,
some Buddhists would say that the Buddha is the first
fully enlightened being, human being, in our historical era. And we, too, can-- and indeed must--
become like the Buddha. We all have a potential
for Buddhahood within us. We can all achieve
that enlightenment. And the stories about the
Buddha tell each Buddhist how he or she can affect his
or her own enlightenment. And Muhammad, a very clear
historical figure, we know more about him than we
know about any other, almost any other founder of a
major world tradition because he was so much later. And so there's no doubt
that any of these figures actually existed. But the important thing is the
religious use made of them. Muhammad has been
translated into a mythos by means of Muslim law,
which instruct Muslims to eat and pray and wash
and speak and love and greet his friends and walk around
just as Muhammad does. The Muslim law is
based upon the Sunnah, the behavior of the Prophet. And that means the
ideal is that you can, in any Muslim who
is fully observant, you see the Prophet
walking around, how he would have
behaved, being lifted out of the Seventh
century, and you know, into the heart of the
lives, religious lives of Muslims living
centuries apart from these extraordinary
events of his life. So Muhammad, the
idea is not just to follow Muhammad slavishly
in his external gestures. But the idea is that by
imitating and modeling our behavior on those
aspects of his life, we will begin to cultivate his
internal disposition of Islam, a total surrender
and openness to God, a total abandonment of ego and
a total openness to the divine, which enabled him to
have the revelations and to pass them
to other people. What I'm trying to say is that
God and Jesus and Muhammad and the Buddha are not
distant figures confined, imprisoned in history. They are historical
figures but they're not, they're not shut there
for all eternity. Because they are
activated by our religious practices and made a living
presence in our lives. And I think this is what we
should do with immortality. Many of the great sages
of the religious life were very wary indeed about
talking about the afterlife. Even St. Paul, who
was very much thinking in apocalyptic, eschatological
terms, said famously, I have not seen,
ear has not heard, nor has it entered
into the heart of man what things God has prepared
for those who love him. And the Buddha, for example,
when questioned about nirvana, would a Buddha who
had been enlightened, would such a Buddha be
alive and exist in nirvana, said this was really an
inappropriate question, inappropriate or
improper question. Because we just don't have
the experience or the evidence or the words or the concepts
to talk about such a state. You can ask this question
but we don't know. And in Buddhist
tradition, it is a heresy to say that the Buddha is not
alive and existent in nirvana. But is also a heresy to say
that he is not, that he is, or I forgot which
on I said first. So telling you that
we are here, we are at the end of what words
and thoughts can usefully do. And just as we are with
God, God is not something that we can define or
label or set limits upon. Like nirvana or Brahman,
God is indescribable because He goes beyond our
ordinary mundane experience. And Confucius positively
discouraged his disciples, his pupils from speculating
about the afterlife. And this was unusual because
the Chinese, until his time, had made a great
cult of ancestors. And the whole Chinese
cult was very much geared to worshipping
the ancestors, making sure that your
own ancestors achieve their immortality
and were turned into a benevolent presence
for the community, very much concentrating
on life after death. But as Confucius said, until
you have learned to serve men, how can you serve spirits? And until you know
about the living, how can you learn
about the dead? Concentrate, said Confucius,
on what you have here, on what we know we have. Don't waste time in speculation. This is what we have. But that doesn't mean
that we are imprisoned in terror and
mortality and despair at our possible extinction. Because we are, by our
religious practice, making a discovery that
we have an immortal self. Because at first, in
the very early stages of the religious
history of humanity, not many of the
peoples of the world believed in the personal
immortality of the human being. The Greeks, for example, saw
there was a kind of afterlife, but people were literally
shadows of their former selves, down in the underworld. They are jibbering. They are fluttering around. It's inhuman, almost
obscene, brought alive by blood being poured
out in front of them or into their grave. When you passed the grave of
the dead hero of your city, you averted your
gaze because you knew that the hero was
furious at being dead. He was down there in the
underworld, his wraith chuntering away down there. But this was no
great apotheosis. And the Psalms are very
clear that there's not much life down there in Sheol. Who will praise you there
in Sheol, says the Psalmist. And indeed, the idea of personal
immortality in an afterlife has never been a very central
preoccupation in Judaism. I mean, the Epic of
Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is told that human beings
can't have immortality and that his job is, if
he wants to be remembered after his death and
gain some immortality, then he better build his city,
build some wonderful city walls, and use the new
technique of writing to achieve his immortality. But things began to change
with what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, the period
from about 900 to 200 BCE, when many of the great world
religions that have continued to nourish humanity
either came into existence or had their roots. So you have Confucianism, Taoism
in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, and monotheism
begins in Israel. The Greeks, they are another
story, very interesting, but they are another
slightly different story. They're going on
at the same time. One of the great
discoveries of the Axial Age was the inner world. Ancient religion
had not gone in much for disciplined introspection. But this was one of
the, that people, as they had more leisure,
as their societies became more complex, they began
to discover introspection and practices such as
yoga, which may or may not have been a very ancient
practice in the subcontinent of India, was greatly developed
at that time, a real journey into the inner, into
the inner world. And as they journeyed
into the inner world, they became very
interested indeed in the immortal self
or the immortal soul. These two are different. And I just want to get
this out of the way. In India, when they talked
about the Atman or the self, they're not talking
about the soul because it's not considered
a purely spiritual aspect. It's the essence of the
human being, body and soul. So it's an important
distinction there. And they came to believe that
we all had, within ourselves, the capacity or the potential
to develop a state of mind, a state of serene peace
in which we felt free from the terror of mortality
and became almost transcendent to our surroundings. But we discovered
it within ourself. And it was hard to discover. So people would start to look
for the self or the soul. And this was hard to
do because the self was lay beyond our normal
psychomental experience. We often think today that
our feelings, our ideas, our intellectual thoughts
are the highest and most spiritual parts of us. But this is not to
be confused with what they were looking for. They were looking, as
one of the Indian sages said, for the part
which perceives, or the Perceiver, as it
were, with a capital P, that lies behind our perception. The hearer that lies behind
our capacity to hear. The seer that lies behind
our capacity to see. And that's very
difficult to get to. But nevertheless, the
sages of the Axial Age were not deterred by difficulty. And they mounted a heroic quest
in search of this inner self. Now, one of the first of
concerted and organized of these attempts was undertaken
by the sages of the Upanishads, probably starting in about
the seventh century BC. And they did experience by
means of their disciplines of introspection and of
dismantling normal habits of thought, they did
begin to glimpse the self, what they call the Atman,
the inner self, the essence of the human being,
which they said was identical with Brahman,
the ultimate reality. It's a very important
religious moment because everybody has
followed them there. In all the religious traditions,
it's clear that God is not-- for example, in the
monotheistic tradition-- is not just something out
there, some distant reality, some kind of cosmic big
brother, some overseer. He's also discovered in
the depths of the self. He's also experienced within. God is here within. And Christ, we see
Christ in others, which means we see the divine
aspects of the human being within each other. This is an important moment. Now this self was immortal. Here's a description. The self, the
Atman was immortal, beyond hunger and thirst,
sorrow and delusion, old age and death,
imperishable, indestructible. Now, these people weren't
on cloud cuckooland. They knew they
were going to die. And they, you know,
they saw their friends and fellow mystics die. But this was not the point. If you manage, they say,
to let go of your ego, you would go into the Brahman. You will be dissolved into
the Brahman when you died. But you had to let go. And that's difficult
to do because we are instinctively
geared to preserving our ego at all costs. I mean, life is tough out there. We can't just wander
round in a trance. We are programmed, ever since
we came out of the caves, to defend number one, to make
sure we get enough to eat, to ensure that we survive
and that our children, our offspring, and
our tribe survives. Personal survival is a very,
very, very strong drive within us. But if we can lay
that aside and manage to make the supreme spiritual
effort to let that yearning for personal survival
and permanence go, then we probably do
enter a different stage of consciousness,
an alternative, something, a completely
different mentality. So, but this was a long process. There was no born again
Upanishadic experience where you suddenly, instantly
discovered the Atman and that was it. This was a long, long
slow, disciplined process. And in the
Upanishads, you're not going to get that experience
simply by reading the text. Because the texts
are simply giving you the end of the
meditative process. But you can see what
was kind of going on. One of the sages,
one of the first, would have conversations
rather like a Socratic dialogue with some of his
pupils and disciples, and gradually, and
asked them what they thought the Atman was. And each time, he
would show that this was an inadequate notion, an
inadequate notion, until you began to realize that you were
moving beyond what you could usefully think or say about this
level of ineffable experience. And finally, you're
reduced to silence. Suddenly, they fall silent. And in that silence is
a moment of realization that you are beginning
to move beyond the power of ordinary words and
ordinary thought processes. So, it was a long, long
training in inwardness. The practitioners
were encouraged to look at their inner life,
to think about their dreams, for example. Was the Atman, what happened
when we went to sleep and could create
suddenly whole worlds? We became creator gods, creating
carts and seas and rivers. And then we go into
really deep sleep, where we're completely
lost to the world and not even dreaming. Was that the Atman? Was that the Atman? Or was our breath the Atman? They were beginning to discover
the deeper and deeper layers of the personality
in a disciplined way. But it was a long process. First you had to be prepared
to give up your ego. Now, a lot of religion
is geared precise-- not to losing our
ego, but precisely to propping up our egotism. A lot of people don't want to
lose themselves in religion. They want religion to give them
a greater sense of identity. They want to be
themselves, and more so. I mean, that's one of the flaws
of those oversimplistic ideas of heaven and hell
and personal survival. The Upanishads thought
that to desire, to go to join the gods in
heaven was an inferior desire because you're
just wanting to let your old, dreary, old, flawed,
egotistic, grasping, frightened self go on in the next world. And this was not the point. The point was to
let that ego go. And as one of them
said, you know, when all the seas, when
all the rivers finally flow into the sea, they're
not saying, I am this river, and I am that river, anymore. They've let themselves go. And that's what you
have to do if you want to experience moments
of immortality in this world. But the experience of this
state of serenity, peace, joy-- here's another description. Once you have encountered,
entered into your Atman, you are calm, composed, cool,
patient, and collected-- almost what we would
call heavenly peace. But you could do it in this
world of pain and fear. Now, there's a story in
one of the Upanishads that Indra, the
great warrior god, decided that he wanted
to find his Atman, too. So he came down to earth
and studied with a guru and had to live like simple
Brahminical students. He had to collect his
teacher's firewood. He had to live a
nonviolent life. He had to be chaste,
humble, self-effacing. And this was Indra, who
was addicted to violence, never stopped boasting
about his exploits in the usual mythologies. And it still, even
Indra the god, it took him 101 years for
him to find the Atman, to experience this inner
peace and to experience this inner dimension of himself. And so that was meant
to encourage people. Look, it took Indra that long. So don't give up yet. This is a long process. So religious truth will
not make ever any sense. Whatever we're discussing,
whether it's the nature of God or the nature of immortality
or the divinity of Christ, it will make no
sense to us unless we are prepared ourselves
to be transformed by it, and, I think, to let the ego go. Remember my little mantra,
ego distorts our vision and limits us. If we can get beyond it,
we experience immortality. Now, the Buddha called
this supreme state nirvana. And he described it very much
as an experience out of time, free from the constraints
of time and space and fear and sickness and
aging and all that. At various times in
the Buddhist text, nirvana is called the unborn,
unaging, deathless, sorrowless, incorrupt, and supreme freedom. And at sometimes he
gave it, deathless was one of the most
common of these epithets. He also gave more
positive descriptions. He called it, nirvana was
the other shore, peace, the supreme goal, the beyond,
the harbor, the everlasting. And the Buddha was
convinced that this was not a supernatural state. This was entirely natural
to humanity to do this. In fact, you are
perfecting your humanity. And the enlightened
human being who had managed to achieve
nirvana was simply demonstrating spiritually
what the potential of the human being
could be, just as an athlete, an Olympic
athlete, or a dancer reveal a potential in the
human body and its capacities that is beyond the untrained
person, certainly of myself. And so, the literal
meaning of nirvana, however, was blowing out. And what was being blown out was
the fires of greed and egotism. One of the most popular
and favorite ways of achieving nirvana
was by the contemplation of what the Buddha
called anatta, no self, that we had no self. And often people say, oh dear,
this is really very negative. And various postmodern
literary critics have said we have no self. We're just a passing
succession of states. But the Buddha wasn't really
interested in this kind of metaphysics. What he was saying, as usual,
this was a program for action. He wanted people to behave as
though the self did not exist. And if they did
behave in this way, they would find that
they were much happier. And the texts show that
when the disciples first hear the doctrine of
anatta, they rejoiced. And it sounds weird
to us that people would rejoice by being told
that they didn't exist. But if you think about
it, if you think about it, it would be a wonderful relief. We've all had those moments
when we wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and think,
why don't I have this. Why does this happen to me? Why can't I have what x has? And on and on we go. It is our selfishness, our
self-regarding tendency that makes us miserable. It is the cause of the pain
and suffering, or dukkha, as the Buddha called it, that
we're trying to get beyond. And so if we lived as
a constant practice of, as though the self
did not exist, we would, we would achieve a much
greater peace of mind. Though it's hard to
do because, as I say, we are endemically and
chronically selfish. Another thing, another
of his practices was called the immeasurables. He use to urge both
laypeople and monks alike to send out waves of
benevolence to all the four corners of the earth, not
emitting a single creature from this radius of
concern, so that you learn to rejoice with
other peoples joy. And that's not what, we
don't always do that. There's usually some
lurking sort of resentment hovering around in our being. Or really sympathize with
another person's pain. And feel total equanimity
towards all beings so that we don't
prefer one to another. And that's, again, very, very
difficult, a lifetime's job. But if you do it,
if you did break free of this self-oriented
constriction, the experience, and I quote, is expansive,
without limits, enhanced, without hatred and
petty malevolence. And it can lead to
what the Buddha called release of the mind, which
was his synonym for nirvana. Your mind is set free of
all this fear and terror and egotistic self-striving. We have to be prepared
to let ourselves go and not think we're so precious
and special that we should be permanent. The idea is that if we can, if
we could sort of let that go, we'd be even better. You know, we'd be enhanced,
this free and loving person. And the Chinese
understood this very well. One of them, the fourth
century Taoist, Zhuangzi, decided early that he had a
sort of conversion experience when he realized that it
was impossible to preserve your life indefinitely. Nobody could. And at first, and for three
months when he realized this, he went into a depression. But afterwards, he experienced
an absolutely liberating freedom. Like many of the Chinese,
he saw the whole of reality as what he called a
great transformation, like a whole lot of roiling
atoms that periodically came together and formed
a new entity for a while, like this podium or you
or me or that camera. And then, eventually, these
aspects of reality fell away and you rejoined
the cauldron again. And he said, we've got to
go with the flow, literally. You've got to go
with this thing. And he would sometimes
try to shock his disciples into an acceptance of this. When his own wife died, a
friend called around to see him, pay a condolence call,
and was utterly shocked to see Zhuangzi sitting
on the log of a tree, singing at the top of his
voice, and bashing the time out on an old battered old tub. And he said, what are you doing? This was your wife. And the Chinese had very
elaborate ceremonials of mourning. What are you doing? She was your wife
for all those years. Surely you should mourn for her. And Zhuangzi smiled. And he said, when she died, I
mourned like everybody else. But then I realized
that I was completely going against the flow
of what reality is. Now she's gone from, I
thought, back to the time before she was born. Suddenly, there was
a wonderful change in this great boiling
cauldron of reality that's constantly changing. It all came together
and suddenly there was my dear wife. And now she's gone back to
join that great transformation. She's in the best place. She's in the bosom
of the way, the Tao. She's like the four
seasons that come and go. And you know, why should I hold
on to her in this selfish way? And there's another story
where one of his friends goes along to visit
a man who's dying and is appalled to find the
wife and children sobbing by the death bed. He says, shoo, get out. You know, don't interrupt
change in the process. And then he leans
against the, and says, I wonder what you're going
to come back as next. Maybe you'll come back as
a rat or an insect's leg. And you know, the dying man
smiles and he says, you know, I was so fortunate to have
been born human at all. And the processes of life
have been so generous to me and they brought me to this. How ungrateful it
would be for me to insist that I must
be a human next time. He said, I'll go to
sleep and then I'll wake. And so there is a kind of
constant, kind of playfulness, but a sense that if we allow
our precious selves to go, then we'll get something richer. Now Confucius, whom
I mentioned earlier, who didn't have much
time for, you know, talking about heaven
or the next world, was probably the first person,
at least in my cognizance, to make it crystal
clear that religion was essentially altruism. He was once asked what
is the single thread that runs through all your teaching. What is it that
draws it together? He said, it's this,
consideration, shu. Do not do to others as you
would not have done to you. And what, said his
disciples, what is the practice that we can
put into practice all day and every day? And he said, do not do to
others as you would not have done to you. And this demands, he
called it the shu. I means, really,
a good translation is likening to oneself. You look into the depths
of your own world, work out what it is
that gives you pain, and then refuse under
any circumstances to inflict anything like
that on anybody else. And if we were doing that day
by day, moment by moment, hour by hour, we wouldn't
have time to spend worrying about heaven or hell
or scapulars or the first Friday devotions or even the exist-- and we would be in a
state of constant ekstasis because such a practice demands
that we dethrone ourselves from the center of our
world and put another there on a daily, hourly basis. We are stepping outside the
constrains of our selfishness. And this brings a
certain immortality. Now, he said that-- Confucius is not at
all interested in what his disciples or he himself
were going to go to. And I think it's significant
that the Chinese like to refer to the ultimate
reality as the way. It's a path. And treading that path
is an end in itself. It is wholly absorbing,
wholly dynamic. You don't need to be worrying
about what you're going to. You're not going to a place,
in the Confucian world, nor are you going to a
person or a personalized god. You are simply
treading the path. And what you're
being introduced to is a state of
transcendent goodness, which Confucius called ren. And he refused to define it. Later, sages would
define it as benevolence. But that was too
narrow for Confucius, who said that it's beyond any
category in our society, this. Because it takes us beyond,
into a state that is beyond what we know. It's a lifelong
struggle because it demands the eradication
of our vanity, resentment, and the
desire to dominate others, that we do all the time. But here is what his
favorite disciple said about ren, his favorite
disciple, Yan Hui, whom Confucius always felt was
further along the path than he himself. With a deep sigh,
Yan Hui then said what it was like to
practice ren day by day. The more I strain
my gaze towards it, ren, the higher it soars. The deeper I bore down into
it, the harder it becomes. I see it in front, but
suddenly it's behind. Step by step, the master
skillfully lures one on. He has broadened me with
culture, restrained me with ritual. Even if I wanted to
stop, I could not. Just when I feel that I have
exhausted every resource, something seems to
rise up, standing over me, sharp and clear. Yet though I long
to pursue it, I can find no way of
getting to it at all. Now, ren is not
something you get, but something that
you give day by day by practicing the golden rule. But it is, notice the aspects
of transcendence of that. The practice of walking with
ren wells up from within. And it also stands over him as a
sort of companionable presence, sharp and clear, both an
imminent and transcendent divine. And that simply by
walking the path, what basically what Confucius and
what the Buddha would say is-- or even St. Paul
would say-- is what happens after our death
is not our business. We can walk the path. And here are some
other Confucian quotes. Mencius said that the
Golden Rule brought him to a state of mystical oneness
with the whole of reality. All the 10,000 things are in me. There is no greater joy
for me than to find, on self-examination,
that I'm true to myself. Try your best to treat
others as you would wish to be treated yourself. And you will find that this
is the shortest way to ren. And by behaving as though
other people were as important as yourself, you would close the
gap between heaven and earth. In your own person, you would
close the gap between heaven and earth and
become, the Chinese felt, a godlike being yourself. And then Zhuangzi, probably
one of the greatest Confucians of all in the Third century,
a rationalist in many ways, but also a mystic
and a poet, writes this about what he calls the
great and true enlightenment when the mind is empty of
self, unified and still. And he has achieved
a panoptic vision. This is almost like a heavenly
vision, of being in heaven except you're here on earth. He who has such enlightenment
may sit in his room and view the entire area
within the four seas, may dwell in the present and
yet discourse on distant ages. He has a penetrating
insight into all beings and understands
their true nature, studies the ages of
order and disorder and comprehends the
principle behind them. He surveys all heaven and
earth, governs all beings, and masters the great
principle, and that all that is in the universe. Such a being is, he said,
godlike, broad and vast. Who knows the limits
of such a man? His brightness matches
the sun and moon. His greatness fills
the eight directions. Such is the great man. Now, we can sit there saying,
well, that's all very well. But I don't believe
a word in it. But that's because we
haven't submitted ourselves to this regimen. I mean, sorry, but
maybe many of you have. But one of the reasons why
the Buddha, for example, always refused to
define nirvana was that it is a state
of utter selflessness that is absolutely
incomprehensible to those of us who have not divested
of ourselves of our egotism. The Buddha would die. He would grow old and sick and
die a painful, lonely death of dysentery. But the point was
that in nirvana, it wasn't a place or a person. It was something
that he discovered in a core of sacred peace
that in the heart of his being that enabled him
to live at peace in the midst of suffering. Not in a cut off way
by which, you know, he put himself into a trance and
the rest of the world could go hang. Because the other
side of this was that you had to practice
compassion for all living beings. This is part of your discipline,
compassion and selflessness. And of course, the compassion
and selflessness are one. Now Christianity,
Christianity and Islam both got affected
by Zoroastrianism with its sort of rather vengeful
vision of the end of times and battles and the
division of the world into good and evil
doers, et cetera. But they knew this very well. In that early hymn quoted
by St. Paul in Philippians, he talks about how Jesus
achieved apotheosis as a human being by
divesting himself of himself. He emptied himself and accepted
the status of the slave, and even went unto death, a
humiliating death on a cross. Therefore, hath God
exalted him and given him a status that is above
every human being, and called him Lord. It's the same process. Give up yourself and you will
experience a fulfillment, an enhancement of your being. And you see a different
kind of humanity. There's a story that one day,
a Brahman priest passed by and saw the Buddha concentrated,
praying, well, meditating in that serene, strong way. And he was reminded of an
elephant, a tusked elephant, all that restrained and powerful
force concentrated in him. He'd never seen a
human being like that. Are you a god, sir, he said. No, said the Buddha. Are you a spirit or an angel? No, he said. No, said the Buddha. He'd simply found
a new potential in human nature, had activated
aspects of his humanity that in normal, untrained
people were dormant. So what shall I call you,
said the Brahman priest. You can just remember
me, said the Buddha, as one who is awake. He had woken up to the
whole range of his humanity. Now, I'm going to
close by reminding us, of course, that this is
not just a selfish quest. Obviously, it means compassion. That's part of achieving it. It's inextricably
bound up in it. But the Chinese believed
that a man who'd achieved-- I'm afraid they did think
in male terms, rather-- that someone who'd achieved
this affected his environment. He had-- a man who was
totally without self-- had an effect on
his environment. Just simply by walking
around, he made a difference. I think of Gandhi. You must yourself
become the change that you wish to
see in the world. And especially they felt that
if a ruler could divest himself of himself, he could
change the world. Because he wouldn't be going
to wars for selfish gains or anything of that sort. Here is a final quote
from Mencius about what such a person can be. A mature person transforms
where he passes and works wonders where he abides. He is in the same stream as
heaven above and earth below. Can he be said to bring
but small benefit? Thank you. Our speaker has graciously
agreed to take questions. And I think we
have, she's left us, I think, ample time for
about 25 minutes of questions if we need them. And so, we'll do that. I would ask only one
thing, and that is we have two microphones available. And I'd like for you to please
use them, not because we might not be able to hear
your stentorian tones, but because this
is being recorded and we'd like to have the
questions recorded as well as the answers. So thank you if you
would wait on the mic. Yes, sir. Thank you so much, both for your
lecture today and your books, which mean a great deal to me. There is one mystery
I would like to raise, and perhaps maybe it's a
misunderstanding on my part. But your emphasis, or your
talking about-- and this is so consistent-- divesting
oneself of himself, and I think that's
so central to so many in The Lives of the Saints. John Henry Newman talked
about if he would be great, make yourself little. But the thing that intrigues
me is that it seems like that's in such contradiction
with the way we need to give children
a sense of themselves. Yes. That is that, is it only after
you have achieved yourself a kind of vocation, a kind
of fulfillment in your life, that you can then rid
yourself of yourself? No. Thank you. There's a very
important point and I should have made this clear. Well, I'm not talking about
endlessly humiliating people or bringing them down
to earth and, you know, telling them they're
nothing or making them crawl around kissing
people's feet and things. All of the, you know, to
remind you of how lowly a little worm you are. I spent seven years
doing this as a young nun and it was a complete
waste of time. You know, why? Because you become
so concentrated on your own performance
that you're stuck in the ego that you're supposed
to transcend. And, no. I think when they're
talking about self, they're not saying-- of course you must be, you
know, as full a human being as you can be. But the self, selfishness,
it's selfishness, I think, that which when we
look at something, we immediately, instinctively
say, do I want that. How can I get that? Is this going to harm me? How is this going to affect me? So that we see everything
from our own point of view. We grasp at things. We're greedy. We want things. And that's the kind,
it's that kind of self that grasps and clings
and which is the source of a lot of our hatred. Because once we've set our
minds on getting something at all costs, then,
you know, then other people who
might get ahead of us in that stampede for that
good thing become our enemies. So, and that's why
I think the best way to lose your selfishness,
if you're not able to do yoga-- and I know my
limitations, I wouldn't be able to do that
kind of yoga which is a great assault on this
kind of egotistic thinking to take the I out of
your thought processes-- compassion is the
best way, just living a constantly
compassionate life so that you must have a
developed sense of self in order to practice
the Golden Rule. You must be able to say
what it is that I hate and what gives me pain. You must be aware
of that in order not to inflict it on others. As it says in the Bible, love
your neighbor as yourself. You must love yourself. And that doesn't mean
endlessly bashing yourself up because you are a sinful
person, because that's a form of narcissism, I think. I think guilt is a form of ego. Because often it's
just reminding you you're not quite
the splendid person that you thought you might be. But compassion is the best
way because it is asking you all the time, and it's
a hard discipline, to put yourself in the
position of another. But that means that you must be
compassionate to yourself, too. Not endlessly, you
know, lambaste yourself for your failings
or tell yourself you haven't got good qualities. A Jewish friend of mine who
was alive in the Holocaust in Germany said
that as a young boy, he was looking at
all this propaganda and this anti-Semitic
propaganda. And he was about
eight years old. And he lay in bed
and said, no, I will not accept that
evaluation of myself. I do have good qualities. I do have talents. I am not what they say. And he said, how can I
love my neighbor as myself if I don't have that
appreciation of myself? So I think, I am glad
you asked that question. I'm not talking about
ego bashing in that way. But I am saying that when we put
other people often in the place of ourselves in the center of
our universe as a continuous practice-- how would I like such
and such a thing said of me, or of my own people, if we're
lambasting another nation, for example, and
then refrained-- then in that moment you've
transcended yourself. Yes. Simple question. You refer to the immeasurables. And I just wondered if you
could explain what you meant by that, the immeasurables. This is the name given to
it in the Buddhist text. It is immeasurable
because these impulses of goodness, of benevolence to
all creatures have no measure. They have no limit. They must exclude not a
single creature, not even a mosquito from your
radius of concern. And they make you
without measure, too. Because as your consciousness
and benevolence expands, you lose the
constrictions of ego and you become
immeasurable, too. I'd like to invoke the image
of Karen Armstrong working on her next book. She's immersed in it. She isn't thinking
about herself. She transcends herself. She is not afraid
of poverty, death. She doesn't even think
about immortality. That's on one day. On the next day, she
says, is this good enough? Is this worthy of
Karen Armstrong? I'm glad there's both kinds
of experience in your life. Oh, certainly there is. I, you know, I'm no
Buddha, unfortunately. I have much roiling
of the ego and all that still somehow
to contend with. But you're right. I think for me, my work
is a means of ekstasis because I couldn't pray ever. I was always
hopeless at praying. And meditation I could
not do in the convent. But in my work I can
completely lose myself and get great joy
out of, therefore. But other people
will get that joy out of bringing up their
family, for example. I think marriage-- I've
never been married, I've never even
lived with anybody-- but I should imagine
that every day you have to forgive something. Or every day you
have to sort of make accommodations for somebody
else's selfishness. And so all these
are tremendous ways, I think, of just rubbing
the, knocking the corners off one's ego. I think you've done a
wonderful job of showing us how to live in the
world and transcend our limitations of self. Is it possible
that this actually works against the traditional
idea of immortality? So that if you think
that there will be an afterlife in which
you'll have some existence, you might be inclined
to put off some of this until the afterlife? So that, in fact,
you're better off, you have a richer
life, if you feel that there is no afterlife? Well, I think there's
something to be said for that. You see, if you're just doing
all these good things so that you can get to
heaven, as I said, I think this just
does seem selfish. And of course, there
have been tendencies, you know, it's been
pointed out where poor people or impoverished
people or persecuted people have been told to just
wait until the next world when, you know, their
persecutors will be punished and they will be
exalted, and say, well, that's not good enough, and
that what we have is now. And in some, you see, in some
of the Indian traditions, if you are just thinking
about getting into heaven, you're not put your, you know,
your foot on the first ladder. So you have to come
back from the-- even if you get to
the world of the gods, you might have to come back to
the world of pain and suffering because you're
still in your ego. But if you manage to put
your ego to one side, then you'll go to Brahma. Then you will merge like
those rivers into the sea, with great joy. So I think thinking of an
eternal sort of permanent ego survival is probably
unskillful if that is the sole aim of
your religious life. Yes. Would you comment on
grace and sacrament and their relationship
to immortality? Well, I sort of don't think much
about either of those anymore. I used to think,
grace has always been a bit of an
opaque thing for me. Largely, and I think
this is probably because of my particular
religious history, which I think has a larger
ramification, too. Grace implies something
coming to you from outside. I've never experienced
the divine in that way. For me, the divine is something,
or the sacred is something that I find when I'm at my
desk from what I'm doing, and it's engendered
from within me. And I think that the human
race is pretty evenly divided between those who
experience the divine as an encounter with
outside and grace coming to you from without, things
coming to you from outside with comfort and joy, and those
who sort of, like the Buddha, say I can generate
this from myself. And I'm sure there are probably
people living in the Buddhist world who are longing
for a revelation, an encounter with a god outside
themselves, or for grace, and people like me born in the
monotheisms who always felt a complete flop and a
failure because nothing ever did seem to me to be coming
from the outside as grace. Sacrament, I think, is
an important concept because it's a way that the
divine becomes accessible in our world, immanent
to us, and that makes the divine active in the world. It's a way of
concentrating our attention into focusing the fact
that the sacred is here in this ceremony, for
example, and making us live a little more
aware than we usually are. And that we, too, must then
take that grace out to others, always out to others. Let's have someone
from over here. Yes, with the scarf. How do you reconcile the
belief in reincarnation with this notion that you can
reach this nirvana on earth? Isn't reincarnation
sort of implying that there's something better
out there or in our next life? Well, mostly when
the sages thought about karma and
reincarnation, as we call it, then they were really thinking
of not of being born again so much as dying again. And the point was to
get off this cycle. It seemed to many people,
such as the Buddha-- it was bad enough before
his enlightenment-- it was bad enough to have
to go through old age and a humiliating, ghastly,
painful death once. But then to have to go through
it again and again and again seemed utterly intolerable. So the point was
to get out of this. And you could do this
perhaps incrementally. Perhaps in your next life, you
could be a monk or something. Then you'd have a shot
at doing full time yoga. And you might sort of
lose your ego this time. But it would be a long process. But the idea was not
to be born again. That was the goal
was to stop it, just to get out of that
cycle of birth and re-death. Yes, OK. You have the mic. Having studied so many of
the different religions and their various routes
to finding the way and practicing compassion, do
you draw on all eclectically, or do you find that
there's one or two that help the best in
inculcating compassion? Well, I have recovered
a sense of appreciation for religion by the study
of other traditions. And that gave me
a greater insight into what my own
Catholic tradition had been trying to do at its best. And I find them, I cannot see
any one of them as superior to any of the others. I think each has its particular
genius and special insights. They're not all the same. Because each one has
its own genius and each its own particular
flaws and failings and its interesting,
arresting differences. But I am inspired by them
all, as I study them. They've all got
their bad points, too, and we mustn't forget,
all of them, without exception. But the Chinese have been
a real discovery for me on this, a new discovery for
me on this, in this last book, as well as the Indian tradition. So I can't even really say
I'm a monotheist anymore. You know. I would see myself really
as convalescent, probably, as sort of in recovery. Yes, sir. It seems to me that
what you're describing is the inner structure of
generating what John Rawls has described as an outer
structure, as the thought experiment of making a
world in which each of us would be willing to
take any of the places. Now, you're describing
the path for internally, to achieve some of that vision
of a society in which we wouldn't, any of us
wouldn't mind living. I'm so grateful to
you and your work and your willingness
to leave your study and come here tonight. So, thank you. Well, as Diana says,
it's very nice for me to come here and have people
to talk to about these things because there's not much
interest in my own country. Could we have-- I have just read and been
very impressed by an article of our colleague here,
[INAUDIBLE],, on desire. And I sat and thought
about that while you spoke because the emphasis
was so heavy on the mindless. And she speaks about
something which has been lost in
modern times, which is that desire is a good thing. And the desire for God,
and that is very often through the analogy of love. And I wanted you to say
a little because if I have had any experiences
at some deep level, it is that when
something absorbs me, I don't think about
me losing myself. I'm just absorbed. No. Yes. Yeah. I'm just absorbed. Yes. And that kind of
comes out of desire. Yeah. I absolutely agree. And I think the kind
of desires that I am thinking of as being negative
are those ones that simply say, I want, I want, and
grabbing and getting. But desire is what impels
us on the path, of course. And you're right. When you disappear-- I still think of it in those
terms-- into your studies, you've gone, as it were. You have gone. And I didn't quite get
around to reading it. There's a, one of
Zhuangzi's friends was a contemplative who was
found in a trance one day. And he looked an entirely
different person. They said, what happened,
his friend said. You know, you never
looked like that before. And he said, don't you
understand these things? Just now I went. I'd gone. And it's a freedom, I think. It's that freedom that when
you are, as you say, absorbed, you're not thinking
I am absorbed. Because otherwise
you're still there. You are not absorbed. And so these are
impossible things to talk about because, as I
say, they are beyond words. And love, I-- yes. I suppose that for me, I've not
been very successful in love. And so for me, love
is not really a very-- it's just personal to me-- not been a very helpful thing in
my discovery of the spiritual. But, so I like the
compassion more, something that's generated
from me that I can learn to feel with the other. But by all means, I
think we take everything that is noble in our lives-- I think Paul says
that in Philippians-- take everything that is
noble and good and use it. That's why some of
these asceticisms, you know, I really do want
to emphasize that I'm not encouraging a sort of total
negativity of the sort that I experienced as
a young girl, where everything in the outside
world is bad and desire is bad. Desire is what makes us
go on the spiritual quest at the first place. Or our yearning, my
yearning every morning to get to my desk, for example,
or others would experience as the yearning for the other. Again, you're going, abandoning
a position of total self-regard and regarding the other
and seeing the other as godlike and as inspiring
and as a grace, probably. But I suppose it's
simply in terms of my own personal
journey, which has been coming from a position
of damage and isolation, and joining the world again
by sort of engineering it from myself. I'd probably take
that other line. Yes. I appreciate your comments
about the giving or gifting of immortality to other people
through selfless living. And I'm wondering, based upon
the gentleman's first question about the idea of creating in
somebody a true self in order for that true self
to be given away, how the gifting of immortality,
how that can be done. And to those people that
are oppressed or persecuted, that we give, that in giving
them themselves and building them up, we're actually
giving immortality, which is contrary to what
we've been talking about, but in the end ends up
being the same thing. Yeah. Look, here's a lovely thing
that I just didn't have time to get into my talk. China, ancient China,
the rituals performed, you know, you know the Chinese
had a very elaborate code of rituals. The eldest son, for example,
had to serve his father, you know, had to
serve his meals, wash his clothes, all day long. And then the younger
brother looked after him. And there was a
reciprocal ritual. Everybody in the family had
a place whereby they ritually served each other, a pretty
full time ceremonial business. Now, this was slightly magical. In the pre-Confucian,
it was a magical idea that this ritual, they
said, enabled the, say the father to
become an ancestor, to achieve immortality. It was a magical idea. It was a sort of, at first. But Confucius saw the
great potential of this. Because if you treat people
with absolute respect, they become holy. They become holier. They learn to
reverence themselves. And that is, the great
rituals, he said, was-- you weren't doing these
rituals to get immortality for yourself. You were serving your
father in this ritual way to make him immortal, to
bring out his immortal Shen, to make him godlike
and numinous. And after his death, you went
on performing these rituals for him so that his spirit
could grow and develop into a powerful ancestor,
doing it for others. And I think when you give
that an ethical connotation-- And I think, too,
the Golden Rule today has to be
applied globally, too, so that we treat other
nations and see that they are as important as ourselves. Because in the Axial
Age period, this was the beginning
of individualism. You know, people
were moving from a tribal, communal identity. And in the towns,
you are beginning to get the idea of me, me
myself as a unique and special individual. The desire to find your
own immortal, unique self is part of that celebration,
as it were, of individualism. And the business
about compassion was to help to mitigate
the clash of warring individuals or class of
warring egos in the town. Now, that was the
challenge at that time was how do we deal with
these rampant individuals. Now, the challenge is,
in our global world, how do we live together. How do we live as one? Love your neighbor as yourself. Everyone is our neighbor. We live in one world
now so that what happens in one part
of the world will have immediate
repercussions elsewhere. What happens in Iraq today will
have repercussions in London or Jordan even, tomorrow. So that we are,
whether we like it-- one of the sages,
Chinese sages said we should cultivate jian
ai, concern for everyone. And that means everyone, not
just our nearest and dearest, and treat other
nations as though they were as important as ourselves. If we don't like something
being done to our country, we don't do it to others. And that is the challenge,
I think, for us now, to make our religion
speak to this condition of our torn world and,
as you say, confer that holiness of individuality
on people who are deprived, just as the Chinese
lavish attention but absolute heartfelt respect. Not in any kind of patronizing
way of doling out aid in return for benefits and
obedience and alliances, but with absolute respect,
and learn to know each other. I'd like to thank our
speaker once again for a stimulating session. And I would invite everyone
to join her and all of us in the Brown Room, directly this
direction as far as you can go, for a reception just now. So please, you're all invited. Thank you.
