The Religious Problem of Modern Man
But familiarity breeds contempt. Modern man is now seeking in all manner of new religions, in the psychology of the unconscious, and in the wisdom of Asia what has always been in the teaching of Christ and the symbolism of the Church. Yet we cannot blame him, so much has the Christian religion been dragged in the mud. Most of its teachers have long forgotten the meaning of its symbols, even if they ever knew them, and the events in the life of the spirit which they describe have been placed at the safe distance of bygone history. Moreover its Bible is such a vast collection of conflicting ideas that Christians, accepting all of it as the word of God, have often fallen into the absurdity of trying to incorporate the legalistic morality of the Jews9 into their own faith with the fantastic result that many forms of Protestantism are much more Jewish than Christian. They try to interpret the Sermon on the Mount in the same spirit as the Ten Commandments, whereas if they had ever read St. Paul they would realize their utter difference. (Curiously enough, there are times when even St. Paul seems unable to shake off his hereditary legalism and realize the full implications of his own faith.) But in Christianity this legalistic moralism has been carried to such extremes of sanctimonious gloom that for thousands the very word “religion” means little more than doing exactly what you don’t like. So often have the words “God” and “Christ” been said with a frown in the voice or with a type of intense seriousness in which there is no room for humor or beauty that they are apt to cause a deadness of heart instead of a thrill. There is hardly any other religion in the world with quite this depressive atmosphere, and even in Christianity it is confined mainly to Protestantism—to the spiritual descendants of Calvin, Luther, Knox, and Wesley. It is small wonder, therefore, that people of spirit turn to the more colorful faiths of Catholicism (if they wish to remain Christian), Buddhism, Hinduism, Theosophy, or, if they are of a more scientific mentality, to one of the many psychological systems of modern times. I even know those who acknowledge themselves pagans, sun worshippers, and polytheists.
But Christianity is our traditional faith; it is in our blood and bones. Therefore it is possible and very desirable that the wisdom of Asia and the psychology of the unconscious will bring its treasures to light again and interpret them in a way that will give us an altogether new zest for it. Until I had studied the religions of the East for some years the teaching of Christ and the symbols of Christianity had no real meaning for me. But I do not mean to suggest that a study of Oriental faiths is essential for an understanding of Christianity. For my own part, I believe that my understanding would have been much the same had I read Eckhart, Augustine, à Kempis, Berdyaev, and others of their caliber instead of the sages of India and China. But there is an increasing interest in the wisdom of the East among us which will take its own course and to which many will turn before they ever understand Christianity as anything more than a set of inhibitions and outworn dogmas. Of all the new religions and ways of life that have been evolved in the West, Christianity is almost alone in understanding a way out of the vicious circle of dualism, but it is difficult to see how that way can appeal to thousands of thinking men and women unless they can approach Christianity with somewhat changed conceptions of God and the soul. For, as Jung so often points out, the difficulty for modern man with his rationalistic background is to believe in Christianity as a system of theology. As he writes in Modern Man in Search of a Soul:
People no longer feel themselves to be redeemed by the death of Christ; they cannot believe—they cannot compel themselves to believe, however happy they may deem the man who has a belief. Sin has for them become something quite relative: what is evil for one is good for another. After all, why should not Buddha be in the right also? [p. 268]
Indeed, we may say of modern man’s attitude to religion as a whole that he has little patience with doctrines that are beyond objective proof and that seem to him, perhaps arbitrarily, to be stretching his credulity. But if he can be shown that there is a psychological approach to Christianity almost independent of doctrine as such, in which doctrines are taken as symbols of spiritual experiences, this may perhaps be the foundation for a wholly new attitude to religion in the Western world. This is the point of view from which we shall approach the doctrines of the Orient—a point of view which many Easterners have adopted and among whom we must number the Buddha himself. He valued only immediate personal experiences and when questioned upon the ultimate mysteries of the universe answered only with “silence—and a finger pointing the way.”
6. THE ONE IN THE MANY
Although that freedom of the spirit which is known through the total acceptance of life and of oneself can never be contained in any form of words and ideas, it is most clearly expressed in the ancient wisdom of Asia. In Hindu Vedanta, Mahayana Buddhism, and Taoism we find a view of life which comes as near as anything to a description of that inner experience which reveals, as the Japanese Buddhist Hakuin wrote, that
This very earth is the Lotus Land of Purity,
And this very body is the body of Buddha.
The approach to this understanding began independently in both India and China; after a period of centuries the two streams merged and, to my own mind, achieved their fulfillment in China some twelve hundred years ago. In studying this wisdom it is important to follow its historical development, both to grasp the continuity of experience and to see how close a resemblance there is between the growth in history and the growth of that same experience in the mind of the individual. Bear always in mind that the doctrines of these ancient religions are the symbols of inward, personal experiences rather than attempts to describe metaphysical truth. The important thing is not whether the doctrine contains an objective statement of fact about the universe; it is to discover what inward experience, what state of mind or attitude to life would lead human beings to think in that way. For the wisdom of the East has a strictly practical aim which is not mere knowledge about the universe; it aims at a transformation of the individual and of his feeling for life through experience rather than belief. This experience is psychological or spiritual, not metaphysical, and except in certain specialized fields has no relation to occultism or to what we understand in the West as philosophy. (See above, ch. 2, pp. 46–48 and ch. 3, pp. 86–88.)
Vedanta and the Upanishads
Some eight hundred years before the birth of Christ the sages of India began to instruct their disciples with a number of collected sayings and parables known as the Upanishads. No one knows who first uttered them, though from time to time some of them are attributed to Yajnavalkya, of whom Geden writes, “If the name represents a real individuality, and is not merely a title under whose shelter many convergent thoughts and reasonings have found expression, Yajnavalkya may claim a place with the greatest thinkers of the world or of any age.” The Upanishads are the foundation of what was subsequently known as Vedanta, which is to say the “end” or fulfillment of the Vedas, the Vedas being the earliest of all Hindu scriptures. With matchless economy and beauty of language the Upanishads speak in a number of different ways of Brahman, the One Reality which is expressed in all the manifold forms, objects, activities, and living beings of the universe. Thus it is said in the Katha Upanishad:1