Origins of the Perennial Philosophy School of Thought

[Music] in the beginning of the 20th century a school of thought arose with Rena gainin ananda coomaraswamy and Fridtjof xuan which has focused on the enunciation and explanation of the timeless truth that lives in the heart of all the great religions this truth sometimes referred to as the Sophia perennis perennial wisdom or the perennial philosophy finds its expression in the revealed scriptures as well as the writings of the great sages and the artistic creations of the traditional world the perennial philosophy concerns all that is most profound and common to all great religions that truth all those truths which lie at the heart of all religions and which have always and always will lie at the heart of all religions it is known by the name as I say of religio perennis or the perennial philosophy the idea that all of the world's major religions are rooted in one single divine source one divine principle and the idea is that like a perennial flower which blooms every year this one source of all wisdom has blossomed forth as it were throughout history and the major religions Hinduism Buddhism Taoism Judaism Christianity Islam are understood to be like flowerings fourth of that wisdom perennial of course meant literally year by year in other words something that's always there so the the perennial philosophy is the timeless philosophy the philosophy that's been available to us from the beginning of time a body of truths of principles which are unaffected by time they're not contingent they're not the production of one culture or another culture they're not ideas that have arisen in a particular historical formation there are ideas principles truths which are permanent which have always been with us so it's it's from a from from the point of view we're discussing here it's not a matter of trying to think up some new ideas it's a matter of trying to understand those ideas and principles which have always been one can speak about all the religions having a common inward truth indeed I would say one can speak about all the religions having in common truth virtue beauty and prayer this is a formulation that for Thea Xuan has used mr. Xuan yes you have written more than 25 books on religion and spirituality your first book was entitled the transcendent unity of religions may I ask you how one should understand this unity unity yes because there's only one truth and this truth is obliged to manifest itself through different forms because these forms are possibilities different possibilities it's like language we have different languages different races different times such a yoga opera yoga treta-yuga kali yuga so mentality changes aryan it's not a sea night a Mangal is not an Indian and so on and the metaphysics then is the truth behind the meanings yes the one truth behind different expressions the relationship of the perennial philosophy to the historical religions is like the relationship of the unique essence to its different forms if you think of the yin-yang of the Chinese or the Shahada of the Muslims or if you like the beginning of the gospel of Saint John in the beginning was the word the Word was with God and the Word was made flesh and lived within us these are all expressions of different traditions that are very fundamental they are expressions of a fundamental truth upon which many other truths or many aspects of the truth become evident everything else proceeds from these very fundamental truths and this is the similar relationship between the unique essence and its different forms the forms build upon the unique essence of God that has found its way into the different forms and yet the way that those different forms manifest themselves are very different one being in a Chinese media and another being in a Muslim Near Eastern menu and soul so what matters really when you get down to the the bottom of it is who God is who man is and what the relationship between the two is religion is there to bind man back to God and in fact that's what the origin of the word religion means to bind so throughout time God of course is the same and if we accept that man is made in the image of God the essence of these teachings is the same it never changes as long as we know what God is what man is and their relationship the philosophy apprentice embodies those universal truths to which no one people or age can make exclusive claim there is only one mythology one iconography and one truth that of an uncreated wisdom that has been handed down from time immemorial ananda coomaraswamy a perennial astiz one who understands as best they can the perennial philosophy who adheres to it who not only subscribes to it as a set of propositions but who tries to live by it he tries to actualize it traditionalist I think I used to use this term a lot myself and in fact my first book was entitled traditionalism it's a term I feel less comfortable with now because I think it's more limited than perennial list tradition is certainly one of the key ideas in both going on and shoe on and the basic idea is that tradition is more or less more or less synonymous with the perennial philosophy that the tradition with a capital T is the truth enshrined in the perennial philosophy available at all times to all manner of men and women throughout history wherever they find themselves tradition speaks to each man the language he can understand provided he'd be willing to listen this reservation is essential for tradition we repeat cannot become bankrupt it is rather of man's bankruptcy that one should speak for it is he who has lost the intuition of the supernatural in the sense of the sacred with Jeff Shawn that traditions the traditions are really the religions to explain it as simply as possible the Islamic tradition the Hindu tradition the Chinese tradition so these are traditions which emerge from a revelation that at a particular point there is a divine revelation which issues forth in a whole way of life a whole civilization this is really I mean again the modern mind finds this difficult to apprehend but this is really what a civilization is it's a incarnation as it were playing out through time of the truths enshrined in a particular revelation so what is the Islamic civilization it is the material working out the material manifestation of the descent of the Quran the life of the Prophet and so on all of this is that is the foundation from which all else flows so a traditionalist is someone who believes in tradition in both those senses tradition as a kind of primordial wisdom and the traditions so a traditionalist believes in the primordial wisdom and believes in the validity of the different religious traditions because they all come from God it is tradition that transmits the sacred models and the working rules and thereby guarantees the spiritual validity of the forms tradition possesses a secret power which is communicated to an entire civilization and determines even those arts and crafts whose immediate objects include nothing particularly sacred this power creates the style of a traditional civilization t-tests Burkhardt I've come to the view recently that perennial list is a more satisfactory terminal though of course not without its problems also because in the in the popular mind the phrase the perennial philosophy is associated of course with Huxley and with Huxley's book of the 1940s the perennial philosophy a fine book in many ways but in other ways rather confused and idiosyncratic and there are also various quasi spiritual quasi religious movements which lay claim to a perennial philosophy so sometimes the works of someone like mr. xuan going on become confused with let us say orab endo or Aldous Huxley or people of this sort and this this kind of confusion can lead to a lot of misunderstandings so even with the term perennial estate needs to be defined and clarified and disassociated from various other movements which share a certain amount of ground with the perennial ist's proper but which in other respects actually I don't realize this but they are actually symptomatic of the confusions of modernity [Music] think that often the name of the school of thought or an intellectual perspective only comes about sometime after that perspective has already been articulated in the case of traditionalist school or the perennial school as its variously called today the founders of that school themselves were not overly interested in titles one might even say that they weren't interested in me isn't but in the thing itself in the content of the school of course this content relates to perennial truths and to traditional doctrines so in that sense the terms perennialism and traditionalism are a convenient shorthand way of referring to the school and to its central ideas the perennial its school is a school which was in fact initiated by Rene Ganim as the first writer in time in the twenties already he wrote the crisis of the modern world and to which later writers such as free of chuan and and a Kumaraswamy Martin Lynx and many others joined in the sense that they all expressed the same views about the time in which we live and about truth in its many facets traditional societies were closed systems meaning that each religion had its own culture based on its beliefs and traditions of course going back to time immemorial but with the Renaissance in the West there developed a kind of materialism and scientism this undermined the religious sensibilities of Westerners and led to a market secularization of society at that same time travel was also becoming easier and so religious cultures from around the world began to mix when you come into contact with another religious tradition and you sense truth in it it's a natural result that people will begin to question whether their own religious tradition is the exclusive way to the truth and then it came to the 19th century when of course there was an explosion in secularization and in a distrust of tradition and a confusion regarding the exclusivity of religions and so on into that scene of reigning gay no his writings appeared in the early 20th century and his writings reminded the world that there are eternal truths that underlie all of the traditions his point was that within each tradition there are the same truths and these truths are simply expressed in different ways in the different traditions thus one can understand in depth the religion of another simply because their religion is lying upon the same foundation really of the same fundamental concepts as your own and gain owns really reiteration of those truths his thought became known as the perennial philosophy and his writings were really the beginning of the perennial of school of thought so gay now is considered the forerunner of the perennial school of thought and this school of thought was to find his full development later on in the writings of Christoph Chauhan yes Rene genome was the first to write first of all criticizing the modern world placing it where it belongs that is to say at the very end of what the Hindus called the Kali Yuga the fourth age and then to speak about metaphysics ultimate reality and its innumerable modalities and attributes and aspects so first of all he cleared the ground so to say by saying the modern world is something quite unusual and extraordinary in the life of humanity and then having made a tabula rasa he built up an understanding of what tradition means what religion means etc etc his work is a tremendous work which has led thousands of people to the truth and especially the journals writings on symbolism they are quite outstanding he was very familiar at a profound level but the Hindu doctrines and with the Taoist doctrines and much of his teaching had a Hindu tinge or at hours to finish quynh anh's view was that modernity is really a kind of negation that the whole modern worldview is in a sense built on ignorance it's it it it seems to be a positive worldview which gives us an alternative way of understanding things but it's essential character is the denial of the transcendent and the denial of metaphysics a kind of flattening out of our understanding of reality to it to an entirely horizontal and profane level so that all of the vertical so to speak has is eradicated [Music] ananda coomaraswamy from an early age he manifested his genius in the realm of scholarship he devoted himself principally to what is expressed in the titles of one of his early books the history of Indian and Indonesian arts relatively late in his life he discovered the writings of Rinnegan on and immediately that opened up his was like a stroke of lightning lightening up his horizon he was already one who understood traditional Hindu art in depth but the writings of gana opened up to him in the perspective of the traditionalist vision of things and he became a great exponent of the traditionalist point of view he considered himself and always said that he believed in the philosophy of perennis had you know this was essentially the fruit you might say of his seeking the truth in a variety of places in ways and he certainly believed that the truth has always been with us in one form or another though often renewed by a divine descent of one form or another as the world grew old and people forgot these perennial truths God in His mercy would renew them in the most effective way and I think that he felt that way [Laughter] fraidy of chuan is the all-embracing author and most preeminent author of the traditional school in that he has not only written about art and metaphysics in the modern world but he has also written extensively about what it means to be man in the sense of men and women to be a human being what is our vocation why are we on earth and he described the various paths through which if we follow our vocation we return to the divine there is nothing in general though which is not to be found in Shan there is much in Shan which is not to be found in general if I were to compare him with current philosophers theologians my impulse is to say I can't do that he's incomparable I find none of them in his same category in terms of intelligent now if I use intelligence I'm using that in the classical traditional sense in which it refers primarily to priorities and proportionalities that is to say seeing what the issue is and speaking to it directly I know of no one who stands in the same category as fertile Shawn when reckoned by that specific criterion for sure on the great error of modern Western philosophy after the Middle Ages was to divorce Razia from intellectus that is the reasoning faculty in the human mind from the intellect I'm confusing the two not only divorcing it but reducing the intellect to reason that is I think what is at the heart of his critique of modern philosophy she one spoke about two current kinds of knowledge encyclopedic knowledge and spiritual knowledge and Chiron was a genius in both spheres his encyclopedic knowledge was awesome he knew the details about all the religions and I cannot exaggerate how he knew the details of Shinto the details of Islam the details of Christianity Eastern Orthodox Roman Catholic Protestants sure and of course was a ingenious and spiritual knowledge knowledge of the heart knowledge of the intellect as Eckhart called it [Music] titters ball Kart was a wonderful writer his writings were very clear crystalline and he himself was like a crystal not only made did he make a major contribution in writing about Islamic art an Islamic metaphysics and religion but he was also one of those magnets people to whom everybody else feels attracted Petersburg had tended to specialize in cosmological subjects he dealt with the spiritual astrology of Meridian even Arabic and he wrote a book on alchemy the spiritual symbolism of metallurgy and that is a miracle at a wonderful eye opener as to what this rather mysterious and obscure subject of alchemy really means the other aspect of burkhardt's work is his analysis of scientism and its many ramifications in modern life and in particular the essay cosmology and modern science where he he says what most needs to be said about modern science generally and about some of its particular manifestations particularly evolutionism and psychologism also when he was a specialist in traditional art one can regard that as belonging to the domain of cosmology sacred art in two books his writings on doctrine and sacred art and cosmology well summed up one is mirror of the intellect and the other one is the essential teachers book out these two books constitute a very well-rounded presentation of burkhardt's intellectual and spiritual contribution and they indicate the major role which he played in the perennial east school mentioned should also certainly be made of Martin Ling's who in some respects is is perhaps the most easily accessed of the great perennials writers in particular if I mention his book ancient beliefs and modern superstitions a work in which is able to distill some very profound truths in in simple language writing in a you know plain style but very eloquent I've found that a very useful work for introducing people to the to the perennial lust outlook I think perhaps his most important work is his life of the Prophet based on traditional accounts this is a this is a work of as one would hope and expect a work of tremendous formality and sobriety and Beauty and the life of the Prophet is is recounted in all of its in all of its majesty and profundity the ancient beliefs and modern suppositions is in nutshells that talks about the paradox of this idea of modern idea of progress which is a myth as opposed to traditional worlds who are anchored in realities eternal realities some of these other lighter works take the form of question and answers and are very useful for spiritual seekers but yes Martin Ling's certainly a major figure in the perennial last movement Markel palace was born in 1895 and he became one of the earliest Western practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism he traveled Tibet on several occasions and nearby countries as well and studied there with Lamas in the tradition he was also deeply influenced by the writings of the traditionalists meta-genome ananda coomaraswamy and for joffrey one each of whom he in fact knew personally and interacted with as a committed Buddhist and as a traditionalist as well he wrote naturally on Buddhism especially in its Tibetan branches but also on the nature of tradition in general he was particularly interested in what he termed the Buddhist Christian dialogue recognizing that while on one level there are certain irreconcilable differences between the traditions on another and higher level these two traditions joined hands so to speak in a transcendent unity at the time of palaces early writings the Tibetan tradition was very little known in the West and those who knew anything of it tended to have a rather prejudiced view of it as some sort of you know superstitious hocus-pocus and you know mumbo-jumbo marco palace in in peaks and lamas and later in the why in the mountain which i actually think he's a much more important book than peaks and lamas although much less popular moko Palace was able to give us an account of the Tibetan tradition in the context of the perennial honest outlook so his his works also I think have a very special place in the in the perennial school Lord Northbourne was one of the English members of perennial school he came to this perspective actually through his writings and interest in agriculture he was the credited with coining the term organic farming and for Lord Northbourne organic farming didn't just mean not using pesticides it meant the proper relationship between between man and his creator between the whole cosmos as a whole should be maintained his very first book looked to the land was discovered by marco palace and marco palace who introduced him to the perspective and he went on to write two beautiful and very simple books that introduced the perspective to a wider audience another Englishman more or less contemporary with Martin Ling's his work religion in the modern world is a marvelous introduction to traditionalist thought again written in a fairly simple style and not requiring any technical expertise in metaphysics or philosophy or anything of that sort so a work that any intelligent reader can could write easily in the years from the 1920s to the 1960s the works of gained own coomaraswamy and xuan kindled writers in such diverse fields as Christianity the American Indian religion and comparative religion studies to write about the unifying and perennial themes of the world's great religions Whitehall Perry met gay known in Egypt and later moved to Switzerland to live near for the Joshua on Perry wrote scathing critiques of the modern Catholic Church and ger gf but he is best known for his monumental compilation titled a treasury of traditional wisdom Joseph Brown read the Joshua on and soon attached himself to him serving as Xuan's intermediary with the American Indian spiritual leaders during the 1940s and 50s which led to Browns book the Sacred Pipe black Elk's account of the seven rites of the Oglala Sioux Philip sherrard was an English author and scholar educated at Cambridge who entered the Orthodox Church while writing his doctoral thesis in Greece in his writings sharara described an oncoming environmental catastrophe which he believed was the result of mankind's neglect of spiritual ideals and practices from a perennials perspective Sayed Hussain Nasser's first introduction to the writings of the three leading perennial lists gained own coomaraswamy and xuan came during a seminar on oriental philosophy in his junior year at MIT in the early 1950s NASA was deeply influenced by Xuan's metaphysical and philosophical writings and when he eventually met Fridtjof xuan in the 1960s he recognized Xuan spiritual authority and depth over the ensuing decades nASA has made a unique contribution to bringing the perennial aspra spective into the academic study of religion say the same NASA of course is the one was done perhaps most for the propagation of the brainiest outlook to his tireless participation in debates in in broadcast in conferences for his relentless traveling around the world he has worked tremendously for four-panel ism and an tradition said who sign us either is a rather unique case of a perennial list or traditionalist who is at the same time an academic he's a well-known professor in Washington DC and he has published extensively not only on tradition and on religion with emphasis of Islam because after all his professor of Islamic studies in America but also on the environment his writings on the environment are extremely important because he has described what nature really should mean to man as a symbol of higher realities as being essentially sacred when modern man regards nature as a thing just a thing without meaning to be exploited and to be used according to his whims and fan all and vibrant mentalists ought to read his book man in nature because it's so important giving the complete and comprehensive dimension and not only that of the scientists most modern scholarly approaches to religion are based in my opinion on the false and mentally crippling idea that the only kind of knowledge we humans can have is limited to the empirical order we have to see hear taste touch or smell something to know it and obviously if that's the case we could know nothing at all about God or the spiritual world or human immortality academic endeavor is a branch of modern science and the problem with modern science is not that it tells us the truth about atoms the problem with modern science is that consciously or unconsciously it excludes higher levels of reality from the beginning therefore it can never reach higher levels of reality in the end modern scholars therefore who have this empirical bias are essentially limited to doing one of three things the first simply look at religion as nonsense and spend their times debunking it cynically skeptically as something that's a kind of residue from man's pre-scientific past the second group of scholars would say no religion has certain positive value but that value is still strictly historical horizontal and social religions promote virtue honesty justice and so forth and then a third group would be themselves personally believers in God but they would feel as though they have to shield that belief from their students still like the other scholars speaking only about historical matters the transmission of sacred texts over time are geological evidence from ancient sites and so forth let others dabble in mental sport or what passes for such that is their affair but such things as these are of no interest to us for the meta physician what matters is to know what is and to know it in such a fashion as to be oneself truly and effectively what one knows renee genome she one once referred to these things by saying that modern enquiry starts from doubt and ancient wisdom started from certainty in academia when is often trained in considering things on the level of the ground so to speak as we seen french on the level of daisies where has a point of view is valid of the eagle as it has often been said so this these two scopes are of course antagonistic in a certain sense most college professors most other faculty having been trained to suppose that ideas and worldviews are strictly a function of historical period political or economic class gender etc etc most scholars don't think you can have any notion whatsoever of something that's truly absolute there's no truth with a capital T for those people I am NOT a relativist today today all our scholars and relativists I am absolutely absolutist that's the difference music I believe in truth and the official scholars don't believe in truth per any last scholarship begins with the conviction as Fritjof Siwon would put it that man is made for the absolute in other words that we have a capacity to know God directly the perennial list teaches about religion he writes about religion with the idea with the conviction that his teaching and writing can have a transformative impact on his students changing not simply how they look at the world but the world that they look at changing the kind of people they are I think in this regard of something that the great metaphysician and art historian ananda coomaraswamy once said he was asked about his own scholarship and he said that he did what he did in the first place for his own soul salvation and secondly for those who might benefit from his results and this seems to me characteristic of all perennial scholarship freedom Schwann first said that I write to make people think correctly it was interested in reviving the art of thinking correctly and he addressed his books to the intelligent Western audience whose intelligence had not become atrophied by the limited perspectives of modern philosophies sciences and the like whose intelligence had not become totally divorced from the sacred his writings tried to address people in whom attraction to the sacred and functioning of intelligence went together most students are open to the idea that there is a truth to be known something that's behind or beneath or beyond this world of facts and change and those students respond very positively I would say in general terms to a perennial espect Evora perennial approach to religion and philosophy sacred art and symbolism and so forth as an example I find that Fritjof Xuan's signature idea but there is a transcendent unity of religions works beautifully as a framework in my introductory class to world religions and I also make use of his teaching that every religion is a combination of doctrine and method of theory and practice also his teaching that the spiritual life is a combination of truth virtue beauty prayer these insights work very well at that level of teaching it's not too difficult to find modern philosophers of religion now who write about pluralism and about accepting other religions as legitimate and they almost inevitably advocate tolerance but what are they really saying if their underlying point of view is that no one religion can possibly have full possession of the truth but that many religions can have various elements of the truth in them then these modern philosophers can safely advocate tolerance among the religions since they're all equal as imperfect receptacles of the truth this kind of approach to religious tolerance might look enlightened on the face of it but it's based on a constriction of the scope of each religious tradition it assumes that none of them can transmit the full truth and therefore also a full and really adequate spiritual method it's like deciding that no one form of music can express perfect musicality in every aspect so therefore each is equally inadequate and thus do an equal measure of tolerance now tolerance is not understanding the approach of perennial ists is different a perennial estas affair teaches that each religion is in possession of the full truth this full truth exists at the core of each but upon that foundation a system of expressions of the one truth rests these expressions are like different dialects of a single language each one speaks to the special mindset and situation of a given people so if you get to the underlying essence of your own religious tradition you can more fully understand others whether they are Muslims or Christians or hinges or whatever because their traditions proceed from the same underlying truth as your own that's the only real way to have a valid interfaith dialogue primary objective a perennial as thought is to demonstrate what the underlying truth is within the different forms of spirituality and to examine how and why it's expressed in a manner that's specific to that one segment of humanity now all of this explains why first off doesn't like the idea of ecumenism but instead he speaks of esoteric ecumenism that's to say that the esoteric dimensions of a religion which are necessarily at the root of the religion which proceeds from a single truth the esoteric ecumenism then implies that the wave for religions to cross a bridge to others is through the esoteric dimension through understanding a depth the essence that comes from God which each one shares with others I think that there's a fair and fairly widely distributed interest today in ideas relating to the perennial philosophy the there's a desire to not only accept the validity of other religions but to know how to also practice one of them and it's very easy to say that everything is valid it's a little bit harder to say that everything is valid and I'm going to do one particular thing the approach of perennialism and traditionalism allows that and I think that that something that younger people myself and and even younger who are looking around at the various new-age phenomenon on the one hand and then on the kind of a fundamentalist or exclusivist phenomenon on the other hand they're looking for some kind of middle path in a sense that avoids those two extremes of kind of total acceptance of of everything but with a lack of content or a lack of firmness and direction and on the other hand a being closed off to any other truths and to being totally exclusivist religions may be likened in their outward or exoteric aspects to different points on the circumference of the circle and in their esoteric or mystical paths to radii leading from these points to the one Center which represents the divine truth this image shows EXO terrorism as the necessary starting point of mysticism and it also shows that whereas the different EXO terrorism's may be relatively far from each other the mysticisms are all increasingly near and ultimately identical converging upon the same point Martin Ling's the authors who founded the perennial school were united in their adherence to the truth which has always been and which always will be their written works endeavored to remind the world that timeless truth in order to lead mankind back to the saving truth within all the world's great religions their message and their purpose can perhaps be best expressed by the words of the perennial of schools preeminent spokesmen Fridtjof xuan in fact everything has been said already though it is far from being the case that everyone has always understood it there can be therefore no question of presenting new truths however what is needed in our time and indeed in every age as it moves away from the origins of Revelation is to provide some people with keys fashioned afresh keys no better than the old ones but merely more elaborated and reflective in order to help them rediscover the truths written in an eternal script in the very substance of the spirit Fritjof shown [Music] you

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Keywords: Perennial Philosophy, Comparative Religion, Philosophy, Metaphysics, Spirituality, Esoterism, Modernism, Interfaith dialogue, René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Ancient Wisdom, world religions, absolutism vs relativism, sophia perennis, religio perennis

Id: P_CNg4dpU54

Length: 49min 21sec (2961 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 12 2018