In the meantime, I want to reflect in depth on Jeffry J. Kripal’s difficult book on the erotic and the mystical in the life of Sri Ramakrishna, Kali’s Child. The underlying thesis of the book is not difficult for me, personally. I have already realized that these two dimensions in my own experience are as inseparable as the human and the divine in Jesus (or, for that matter, in anyone venerated as an avatara within Hinduism, like Ramakrishna himself). Divinity incarnate in humanity, or the human divinized, necessarily includes human eros. In terms of the Orthodox doctrine of incarnation, “What was not assumed is not redeemed.” In other words, if eros is banned from the mystical, then it is also banned from the human.

DHARMA, YOGA, TANTRA

This course will offer a broad historical view of the constant interaction between Hinduism and Buddhism, together with a focused examination of spiritual practices (yogas) common to both, especially in schools categorized as ‘tantric’. This perspective, both broad and focused, will suggest a multi-pronged approach to interreligious dialogue, through: a) reading primary sources in the Vedas, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Yoga Sutras, Hindu and Buddhist Tantras, and subsequent tradition in both East and West; and b) reflection on them in the light of lived experience, especially in those forms of yoga and tantric practice that have spread beyond India and Asia in the last two centuries.

The course will emphasize the ecclesial nature of interreligious dialogue (see Vatican II, Nostra Aetate), and will examine this dimension in a critical/faithful reading of documents of the Catholic magisterium regarding meditation, etc. Students will recognize the interplay between faith and culture in addressing the theological and/or pastoral issues that emerge in Hindu/Buddhist/Western cultural contexts. Students will be invited to share, and reflect upon, their own interreligious connections.

The students will read, study, and critically reflect upon, the interfaith context and relations of yogis and other practitioners of spiritual disciplines, of the distant and recent past, in the light of the Catholic Church’s view of, and relationship with, these faiths and their adherents.
The students will explore how people today, in contact with persons of faith belonging to various traditions, can through dialogue deepen their own life of faith and spiritual journey.

COURSE MATERIALS:

Thomas Matus. Ashram Diary: In India With Bede Griffiths. Washington D.C.: O Books, 2009. ISBN 978 1 84694 161 0

Thomas Matus. Yoga and the Jesus Prayer. Washington D.C.: O Books, 2010.
ISBN 978 1 84694 285 3

Yogananda paramahansa. Autobiography of a Yogi. New York: Philosophical Press, 1946. In the public domain; available for on-line download. Later (somewhat modified) editions from Los Angeles: Self-Realization Fellowship Press, 1970 ff.

SYLLABUS

I—A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE CATHOLIC CHURCH’S ATTITUDE/RELATIONSHIP with regard to other faiths and spiritual traditions. Dialogue as an ecclesial practice and as a personal commitment, in the spirit of a critical fidelity to Catholic tradition, as expressed in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, especially Nostra Aetate. In what way, and to what degree, have Hindu and Buddhist sacred texts become part of contemporary Western culture? [Read Nostra Aetate; understand how interreligious dialogue is integral to the Church’s mission, in service of the faith that does justice; see also the Holy See's document Dominus Jesus and subsequent debate].

II—THE UNCLEAR AND INDISTINCT CONCEPTS OF BOTH ‘RELIGION’ AND ‘HINDUISM/BUDDHISM’ in the context of the Church’s efforts to affirm her own, and Christ’s, ‘uniqueness’; the centrality of the concept of Dharma as a unifying factor between Hinduism and Buddhism [Read from Huston Smith, The World’s Religions; Raimon Panikkar, The Intra-Religious Dialogue].

III—HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM AS ‘SISTER RELIGIONS’: Indian religious traditions and their tendency to coalesce and cross-fertilize, as compared to the separation of Christianity from Judaism and the divisions among Christians; the priority of ‘practice’ and ‘experience’ in both Hinduism and Buddhism, contrasted with Christian dogmatism [Read selections from Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom; Anagarika Govinda, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism; reflect on the range of texts held as sacred by Hindus and Buddhists].

IV—THE WEST AND CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO RECENT HINDUISM/BUDDHISM: the Western discovery of yoga and the re-emergence of the tantric traditions, against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century Hindu and Buddhist revival movements and the Tibetan exile in the twentieth century [Read from Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna; reflect on the renewal of Hinduism through the Brahmo Samaj, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda and others; Sri Aurobindo; Ramana Maharshi and the quest for the Self; read from Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo; Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi; Maurice Maupillier, Le Yoga et l’homme d’Occident; Bede Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West].

V—GURU AND DISCIPLE: The non-hierarchical transmission of India’s civilization and spiritual teachings through lineages of gurus; the new lineages established by Ramakrishna, Yogananda, Chogyam Trungkpa, and other recent gurus [Read from Yogananda, Kripal, et al.; reflect critically on cultural and spiritual transmission in the West in general and in the Catholic Church in particular; reflect also on the changing image of a ‘guru’ in both East and West].

VI—SYNCRETISM AND INCULTURATION: ‘Syncretism’ as intrinsic to Hinduism in general. Hindu and Buddhist worship or veneration of Jesus. Is the practice of yoga or Buddhist meditation in the West a form of ‘inculturation’? [Reflect on the practice of ‘Oriental techniques’ in the West: Matus, Yoga and the Jesus Prayer].

VII—SANNYASA AND YOGA, or ‘Renunciation’ and ‘Integration’ as inherent elements of the inner dynamic of Hindu/Buddhist spirituality [Read passages from the Bhagavad Gita and from selected Buddhist texts; examine the historical and spiritual link between sannyasa and yoga, and between Hinduism and Buddhism; consider the recent tantric revival as reaffirming integration of flesh and spirit].

VIII—MYSTICISM AND EROS IN TANTRIC TRADITIONS, ANCIENT AND MODERN: In what way and to what degree are erotic symbols experienced both inwardly and in outward practice; can we speak of ‘Christian tantrism’ in our own mystics? [Read from Eliade, Kripal, Govinda, Matus].

IX—NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR AN EXPERIENTIAL APPROACH TO HINDUISM AND BUDDHISM through the practice of yoga. [Read from Eliade, Kripal, Matus, and Bede Griffiths, Return to the Centre; understand how a Christian’s opening to yogic/tantric practice can lead to absorption of Hindu and/or Buddhist elements into one’s global vision as a Christian].

X—VARIOUS THEOLOGICAL HYPOTHESES on Hinduism and other traditions in relation to human salvation by, through, and in Jesus Christ [open discussion of these questions and hypotheses, examined by reading from one or more of the following authors: Karl Rahner; Jacques Dupuis; Jules Monchanin; Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux); Bede Griffiths; Raimon Panikkar].

(This was a 40-hour course, three credits, and it was all compressed into two weeks, four class hours a day. It was impossible to do justice to the theme and all the possible ramifications of it. Yet I did my best, and the students made heroic efforts to cover the ground and submitted brilliant papers. But I don’t think I’m going to do a course like this again.)

Comparing the incomparable

The title of this lecture is not properly academic. One might see it on a poster at a street corner or in the side column of a newspaper’s third page, and its wording serves only to attract attention. The key word is ‘Yoga’: a term in nearly everyone’s passive vocabulary, a noun one has heard or seen in a book or article, but whose meaning is vague. The term’s connection with the Latin jugum and the English ‘yoke’ is well known. But from the start I need to note that the meaning of ‘Yoga’ is vague even for one like myself who has dedicated a considerable portion of his life to the study of the area of religious culture identified by this noun.

It is also true that a majority of educated persons throughout the world would not be able to identify ‘Saint Benedict’ as an historical personage, nor would they know that he had written a ‘Rule’. But were one to travel East from here, beyond the Mediterranean Basin, more and more people would immediately recognize the term ‘Yoga’ (whether or not they would be able to give a definition of it), and by the time one reached India, one would likely find a person at a city bus stand who would ask, “The Ethics of Yoga? Do you perhaps mean the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali?”

There you have it: the proper academic wording of my title ought to be: “A Comparison of the Ethical and Ascetical Precepts in the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Yoga Sutras of Patañjali” — a properly academic title, but not very interesting. This academic wording would also expose me to the immediate objection: “Can these two very different texts be compared at all?” Perhaps they could no more be compared than any two fruits of human creativity: say, for example, a film of Federico Fellini and a symphony of Beethoven. In fact, the two texts we consider here may chronologically be separated by about the same time span as that between Beethoven and Fellini; so the Yoga Sutras can be dated a couple of centuries before the Rule of Benedict, some time between the third and fourth centuries of the Common Era.

Obviously, I hope to show that Rule and Sutras can in some way be compared, for the fact that the Sitz im Leben of both is a kind of community dedicated to a rigorous discipline different from that of the human family or other, ordinary, social institutions. I might even be so bold as to say that the communities that gave rise to both texts could be called ‘schools of the Lord’s service’ in some analogous sense. Of course, I would immediately correct my own boldness, before the objection could be raised by a hearer, that the ‘Lord’ in the Rule of Benedict is the Dominus Deus Israel and especially the Dominus Jesus, while Patañjali’s Īshvara (which does mean ‘Lord’), although identified as the supreme Spirit, Paramātman or Purusha, cannot simply be declared the same (under a Sanskrit rather than a Latin name) as the one whom the Bible identifies as Lord and God. Let me state this objection in other terms: those formed in the school of Patañjali do not relate to their Īshvara in exactly the same way as those who have been formed in the school of the Gospels and Saint Benedict relate to the Lord Jesus.

I said, “not exactly as,” but I can always say that a Benedictine’s relationship to Jesus, to God, is in some way analogous to a yogi’s relationship to the Lord named Īshvara in the Yoga Sutras. The analogy is strengthened, as we move forward in time, into and beyond the Western Middle Ages, and we see witnesses of devotional Hinduism, yogis belonging to what are called the bhakti schools. But time does not permit us to cover so much ground, and so we limit our topic and our primary sources to the Rule of Benedict and the Yoga Sutras. However, keep in mind the difference of literary genre: the genre of a monastic rule, which mixes descriptive and instructive teaching; and the genre of sūtrāni, a neuter plural noun that shares the Proto-Indo-European root with the English verb ‘to sew’. The Sanskrit noun, sūtra, can be translated ‘stitches’. Italian has a similar metaphor: stitches are punti, and this word is also used in speaking of points in a discourse.

Aphorisms of Yoga

In many translations, the title ‘Yoga Sutras’ is given as ‘Aphorisms of Yoga’, and this is also an appropriate name for the genre. Here we have pithy, sometimes arcane phrases, often no more than two or three words. These phrases, aphorisms, points, or stitches are in practice used as reminders — aides-mémoires — of a more ample discourse. In fact, underlying the phrases of Patañjali, there is a long history of teaching, an oral tradition like that of so many schools in India and even of the Vedic literature itself; the most sacred texts of Hinduism, like the sūtrāni, are handed down orally, ‘from mouth to ear’, with a mnemonic precision unmatched by scribes and copyists.

Just as the aphorisms presuppose an antecedent discourse, rich in content, which they condense into the fewest possible words, they also have given rise to an abundant literature of commentary, whereby the individual sutras are shown to be practically inexhaustible sources of doctrine and precept. Hence a text like the Yoga Sutras stands as a pivotal point in the midst of many texts, anterior and posterior to it.

In addition to the metaphor of ‘points’ or ‘stitches’ in the title, the tradition also refers to the teachings of Patañjali as ashtānga-yoga. Ashta is etymologically related to Latin octo, that is, ‘eight’; anga is related to ‘ankle’, and the Italian anca (’hip-bone’), and means ‘limb’. So the sūtras of Patañjali are the ‘eight-limbed yoga’, and this calls to mind the ‘Noble Eight-fold Path’ of Buddhism, the eight righteous actions that lead to the cessation of the cause of our alienation or ontological suffering; most significant is the use of the identical term samādhi in both Buddhist and yogic texts, for the eighth of these actions or ‘limbs’.

In the system of Patañjali, samādhi is both a goal and a practice. As the end of yoga, the term samādhi is used to define yoga itself. The first chapter, verse two of Patañjali’s aphorisms gives another, general definition of yoga as: citta-vritti nirodha, “stopping the agitations of the heart”. By means of the eight ‘limbs’, the yogi, having practiced samādhi, attains a perfect ‘concentration’ of the mind upon its own essential being (’concentration’ being a literal translation of samādhi), and mind and heart are still. As a practice, samādhi is understood as a fixed, contemplative gaze and an uninterrupted meditation, and even when the meditator contemplates an external object (a flame, an icon, a name of God, etc.), the practice is ultimately aimed at the mind itself. Hence, in samādhi, as the fruit of meditation, the mind is totally assimilated to its object; the object then paradoxically disappears, and the mind as ‘seer’ (the ‘seeing one’) shines of its own light.

If this were all that yoga is about, we would find it to be a polar opposite of a Christian monastic’s ultimate end. Although Christian monks and nuns do practice meditation and do seek to quiet the heart’s agitation, the goal is not to contemplate one’s own mind but rather to turn mind, heart, and will toward the Trinitarian God, the God of subsistent relations, whose essence is love and whose primary external manifestation to human beings is God’s image in the neighbor, whom we are called to love, even were the neighbor an ‘enemy’. If we sum up yoga in a definition that so starkly contrasts it with a Christian’s ultimate end, we should face the same dilemma that assailed Jules Monchanin, co-founder of the Benedictine ashram of Shantivanam in South India: on the one hand, yoga as practice and goal seems to exclude the Christian life, which is predicated upon divine grace, and on the other, Christianity will never be incorporated into India, its society, and its culture, unless and until Christians incorporate some form of yoga into their spiritual life.

Solution to the false dilemma

Of course, the dilemma is false, to the extent that we have isolated a few terms from Patañjali’s whole text, and his text from the broader, historical context, which reveals to us yoga’s vast plurality of meanings and forms. Similar practices continue to emerge from these forms, so that the various yogas in India and in the Buddhist world can be compared with each other only by way of analogy. At this point, one can indeed sustain an incorporation of some form or forms of yoga into a Christian life, invoking the analogies of experience that bridge the differences among the yogis of Hinduism and Buddhism.

However, we need to remain focused in this brief lecture; so we must stay with Patañjali’s aphorisms, making, now and then, only a passing reference to other traditions and texts. Let us move on to the second chapter, verse one of the YS: “Kriyā yoga consists of tapas, svādhyāya, and Īshvara-pranidhāna.” Here I have provided an English verb and cast the sentence in accordance with English syntax, but the key terms are left in transliterated Sanskrit. These three terms imply a tripartite anthropology of body, mind, and spirit. The term kriyā generally means ‘action’ and here could be understood as ‘practice’; so we are hearing, “Yoga as practice consists of these three kinds of action.” But kriyā is also found in the context of ritual: hence it can bear the meaning of ‘sacred action’ or even ‘sacrifice’. Indeed, in subsequent tradition, especially in those texts called tantras, yoga was often understood as a substitute for the rites described in the ancient texts called Vedas and Brahmanas.

Let us look at the three Sanskrit terms, to see if they also bear some reference to sacrificial rites. The first term, tapas, is etymologically linked to the English ‘tepid’, but it bears the stronger meaning of ‘heat’ and, in a metaphorical sense, ‘fervor’. As a technical term, tapas refers to the systematic practice of asceticism: fasting, physical immobility, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, sensory deprivation, etc. Mythological references to practitioners of extreme austerities suggest that their fervor wins divine favor and endows the practitioner with extraordinary powers. Indeed, the powers acquired by the great practitioners of tapas sometimes thwart the purposes of the gods. However, the aphorisms we are considering do not depend on a mythological world-view. They are more likely influenced by Buddha’s ‘middle way’; Patañjali and his school insist, as do Buddhists and the post-Buddhist text called the Bhagavad Gita, that “Yoga is not for one who eats too much or eats too little, nor for one who sleeps too little or sleeps too much” (chapter 6, verse 16 of the Bhagavad-Gita, which dates probably from the second century BCE). As our own Rule teaches, a monastic’s most rigorous ascetical practice is the quest for the delicate balance between too much and too little.

The second term, svādhyāya, has more than one meaning. The word itself signifies the act and habit of dedicating attention to what is ‘one’s own’, which in commentaries is understood as the doctrine of sacred writings and of one’s own guru or master. In other words, yoga requires a practice quite similar to our lectio divina. The analogy is reinforced when the commentaries reduce to a single word the ‘text’ to which one directs one’s undivided attention. That single word is om, which in the Sanskrit lexicon is given the meaning of ‘yes’ and is identified with the divine essence itself. The absolute ‘yes’ of om is both the affirmation of God’s own self and God’s affirmation of the existing universe. From the single word that contains all the sacred writings and all that exists, the yogi proceeds to meditate on the inner word, the ‘sound of silence’ in the heart. Likewise in lectio divina we are directed from many words to few, and ultimately to one, when the word becomes prayer and is absorbed into contemplation.

The third term that defines kriyā yoga or yoga as practice is Īshvara-pranidhāna. We have already met the term Īshvara, which means ‘the Lord’. In passing, let me note that the generic Sanskrit terms for God, such as Īshvara , Deva (’God’), or Paramātman (’Supreme Spirit’) have been adopted into Christian prayer and Bible translations, at least from the seventeenth century onward. The word pranidhāna describes an act of adoration, a full-out prostration in front of whatever symbolizes the divine. The usual translation is ‘abandonment to the Lord’. There is a certain dissonance between this term and the ancient, dualistic philosophy called sānkhya, whose basic terms and concepts are as it were the scaffolding upon which the Yoga Sutras are constructed. The philosophy in question makes no reference to God or a supreme purusha, while virtually all yoga traditions do make such a reference, and indeed, the yogis are most often engaged in a devotional or even erotic relationship with the divinity. You could say that the popular, ‘health-club’ brand of yoga promoted in the West often reverts to the agnostic stance of sānkhya philosophy, but other modern schools (for example, the Federazione italiana yoga) emphasize the spiritual dimension of yoga practice, and even offer ‘Christian yoga retreats’ at Camaldoli and elsewhere.

The literary inclusion in Yoga Sutras II

The second book of the Yoga Sutras (Yoga as Practice or kriyā yoga) thus begins with three essential practices, and we find them again in verse 32; this double citation forms a literary inclusion that makes of the three terms a hermeneutical key for what comes between verses 1 and 32. There is also a third reference to the terms in verses 43-45. Kriyā yoga, we are told in verse 2, leads to samādhi and to the progressive attenuation of suffering; the terminology is different with respect to Buddhist teaching, but the progressive dynamic is that of the Buddha’s Noble Truths and the Eight-fold Path. The causes of suffering are further parsed in the following verses, centered on the three fundamental ‘inclinations’: ignorance, concupiscence, and aversion (analogous to the noetic, the concupiscible, and the irascible appetites of Western philosophical anthropology), and on the three universal qualities of nature (sattva, rajas, and tamas, or ‘harmony’, ‘energy’, and ‘inertia’).

At verse 11, we find an anticipation of a basic term for meditation (dhyāna) that reappears in the list of yoga’s eight ‘members’ in verse 29: yama (five ‘prohibitions’) and niyama (five ‘precepts’); the time-frame of this lecture allows for a more detailed reading only of these first two of the eight members, which are the ethical-ascetical pillars of the entire yoga system. The other members are: āsana (sitting), prānāyāma (breath exercises), pratyāhāra (withdrawal of sensory attention), dhāranā (simple apprehension), dhyāna (continuous meditation), and samādhi (concentration or total assimilation).

Verse 30 enumerates the five yama: ahimsā (’do no harm’), satya (’speak the truth’), asteya (’take nothing that is not given’), brahmacharya (’keep to the path of the Absolute’), aparigraha (’do not covet another’s good’). The first of the ten words governs all of them: ahimsā, ‘harmlessness’. Like the first precept of the Hippocratic oath (Primum non nocēre), it means that yoga practice must do no harm either to the yogi or to others. Pushing through pain in performing postures, extending meditation periods beyond an hour, holding the breath more than three or four seconds: all of these excesses introduce a tone of violence into yoga and are contrary to the authentic sacrificial intention, which is one of yielding, offering-up, abandonment, surrender.

Gentleness and harmlessness govern the yogi’s use of speech. Satyam, truthfulness, does not mean saying out loud in every circumstance what you regard as true. It means a silent demeanor that renders the yogi’s right conscience evident and gently corrects wrongdoing by the contagion of example. Truth means never judging. The only negative precept of Jesus was: “Judge not.” Truth in our minds also entails our recognition of how little we know and our sincere willingness to listen and learn.

Asteya, ‘not to steal’, means never to take what was not given freely. Many yogis, like Buddhist monks, are mendicants, but they are not active beggars. If they have needs, they leave a bowl at their side while they meditate, trusting that some devout soul will fill it. Yogis with family and social responsibilities practice scrupulous honesty in all their affairs and would rather not acquire goods than to harm someone by acquiring them; the rule is always ‘to do no harm’, ahimsā. All yogis practice gratefulness, and they know that what is enjoyed without giving thanks is as if it were stolen.

The fourth word in Patañjali’s decalogue, brahmacharya (literally, ‘journeying in the Absolute’), is a positive term, although it is understood as a prohibition regarding sex, expressed in euphemistic terms. It affirms primarily the yogi’s commitment to integrating the body’s energies into the spiritual quest; secondarily, the word is often translated ‘chastity’. Properly speaking, chastity is a virtue of lovers; it is practiced in the intimate sexual relationship between two persons dedicated to each other in a conjugal union. Even yogis who live in solitude practice this virtue as if they loved someone dearly enough to do absolutely nothing to harm the relationship; the governing principle is always ahimsā, harmlessness and non-violence. Thus governed and purified, neither the individual’s personal sexuality nor physical intimacy in a faithful relationship are impediments to the practice of yoga and the search for God. I have found, in my own experience of the body’s wholesome appetites and through many years of counseling others, that emotional and psycho-sexual maturity are attained as one’s sex life is purified of violence, obsessive-compulsive behavior, and false guilt. Psychological counseling may be in order, but deep yoga meditation certainly facilitates this process.

The last word in YS2:30 is aparigrahā, which means something like non-grasping; it corresponds more or less with the tenth commandment of Moses, “Do not covet.” It could also indicate a willingness not to cling to persons or things, because doing so would be a form of violence and so run counter to ahimsā. In all cases, we need to see through the grammatical negative in ethical teaching and observe the positive virtues: the true non-violence is a life-giving and healing act; the authentic form of speech is a comforting and enlightening word; the perfection of never taking from another is a generous gift; true ‘chastity’ is expressed by a tender and loving embrace, and non-coveting point to a general lightness of touch that respects the integrity of persons and things. These are qualities for which yogis strive.

Verse 31 affirms: “When the yama are universal, not conditioned by caste, place, time, or circumstances, they constitute the Great Vow.” Verse 32 then enumerates the five niyama. Ahimsā overflows into the niyama, which are grammatically positive. Shaucha means ‘cleanliness’ and is practiced by yogis as frequent bathing and regular bowel habits, etc. Contemporary society has totally secularized this part of life, and that is good. All yogis keep themselves clean, but many of them reject the rules of what traditionally is considered ‘ritual purity’.

‘Contentment’, santosha, is another positive expression of the precept of ahimsā, which governs a yogi’s whole existence. The concrete meaning of santosha can be updated in terms of contemporary ‘green’ concerns; the ‘slow’ movement (slow food, slow fashion, etc.) and the theme of ‘elected simplicity’ also show today’s need for the recovery of this yogic virtue.

The final three words have already been given in the first verse of YS 2, with the name of kriyā yoga. The literary inclusion suggests that these three words are a governing principle for all ten of the yama-niyama, like ahimsā. Tapas, the first of the three terms under kriyā yoga, can be understood to include the three ‘outer members’ of Patañjali’s system, that is, āsana, ‘posture’; prānāyāma, ‘breath exercises’; and pratyāhāra, ‘sense withdrawal’. Of course, ahimsā rules here as well, especially with regard to the postures: with regard to āsana, Patañjali says only that the body should be steady and comfortable. In other words, the yogi assumes a meditation posture that allows the mind to remain focused and awake.

Prānāyāma is not about ‘control’ of the breath so much as about breathing according to the non-violent and self-surrendering intention of ‘harmlessness’ and ‘abandonment to the Lord’. For this reason, the true breath-sacrifice does not require forced holding-in; occasional suspension of breathing or “ecstatic apnea” will happen spontaneously after regular and protracted practice. Finally, sense-withdrawal follows the same criteria of harmlessness and abandonment and consists mainly in the detached observation of one’s sensory experience without forming judgments in the mind.

Parallels in the Rule of Saint Benedict

A Western objection to the philosophical anthropology implied in the Yoga Sutras is that it is ‘Pelagian’, that is, it begins and ends with human effort and human self-control, without any reference to the necessity of divine grace. There are two suppositions underlying this objection, to both of which I must say, “Nego suppositum, I deny the presupposition.” In the first place, Pelagianism is intelligible solely within the history of Christianity and within the context of the faith-works tension that we see in the New Testament. Thus it is totally out of place to ascribe a Christian heresy to a Hindu or pan-Indian tradition like yoga, which neither affirms nor negates any doctrine proper to Christianity. The second presupposition is that the entire tradition of yoga has never known a doctrine of salvation by grace through faith, not even in the somewhat latent way that the doctrine is present in the Hebrew Scriptures. On the contrary, a careful reading of the last chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita, together with numberless texts of the bhakti or devotional yoga traditions down through the centuries of the Common Era, lead us to recognize the presence, even patent, of the doctrine of supernatural grace and the supernatural ultimate end in these traditions. Whether or not this doctrine has been absorbed into some schools of Hinduism from Judeo-Christian influence is another question, about which we cannot interest ourselves in the limited time that remains.

One other superficial judgment about the Yoga Sutras, is that they present a series of chronologically successive steps, which must be sequentially ascended in order to attain the end of yoga, while on the other hand, the Holy Rule, grounded as it is in the gospel doctrine of grace, follows no such scheme of vertical steps. On the contrary, neither the Noble Eight-fold Path of Buddhism nor the eight ‘limbs’ of Patañjali are presented to us as successive steps upward toward the goal. Albeit that the last term of both, samādhi, is presented as an action of the highest value, none of the others is said to be abandoned, even when one attains the perfection of samādhi. In fact, ‘abandonment to the Lord’ is what perfects samādhi (cf. YS2:45). This is especially true of the Yoga Sutras, whose ethical-ascetical grounding (yama-niyama) sustains and governs the practice of all the other actions, including samādhi.

The Rule of Saint Benedict is of course an extension and a concrete application of the gospel, and the teaching on grace that came down to Benedict from Paul and Augustine suffuses the whole atmosphere of monastic life as given in the Rule. Still and all, breathing the air of divine grace, Benedict gives us precepts and aphoristic maxims that can be taken as a sort of Western yoga, a way of integration and interior unification analogous to that evolved by the yogis of Hinduism and Buddhism.

We keep in mind that the Benedict’s Rule can also be read as a narrative text, more descriptive of spiritual practice than preceptive. The Rule is also linked with the ‘life of Benedict’ narrated in the second book of Dialogues attributed to Pope Saint Gregory the Great. Setting aside all the questions of authorship (Did Gregory really write the Dialogues? Is his ‘Benedict’ really the author of the Rule?), a long monastic tradition holds the two texts together, as does the Camaldolese micro-history within the broader sweep of Benedictine history. This linking of a story to a rule can be found analogously in the centuries-old usage of the Bhagavad Gita as a yoga textbook and hence a companion of the Yoga Sutras.

Staying for now with the Rule, we see two possibilities of comparison and contrast: 1) the ‘degrees of humility’ (RB7), and 2) the ‘tools for good works’ (RB4). The latter are certainly aphoristic, and they have always summoned monastic commentators to peel back the layers of meaning in each and all of the ‘tools’; but the inverse commentary is also made, whereby the many are reduced to few words or to one, like the yogis’ om. If anything, our one word is the obsculta, ‘Listen!’, with which the Rule begins. However, recent monastic commentators always take into consideration the literary history of the text and its derivation from the much longer Rule of the Master; in Benedict’s abridgment, we also consider the last chapters of his Rule as hermeneutical keys to the chapters derived from the Master.

Steps up and down the ladder

Chapter seven of the Rule evokes Jacob’s ladder (Genesis 28:12; cf. John 1:51), giving us the image of humility as a dynamic process, associated with another metaphor, that of natural growth. Climbing the ladder is also a way of integration, as Saint Benedict says: “The vertical ladder is our life in the here-and-now, and when we humble our hearts, the Lord raises our life to heaven. Our body and soul are the sides of this ladder, into which God, who is calling us, has fitted the various steps of humility and discipline by which we ascend.” (RB7:8-9) The underlying assumption is that God’s grace makes us who we are, calls us to ascend, and places beneath our feet the steps of humility. Our practice of spiritual discipline is our doing, our kriyā, but it is always  done within and under grace. It is also done within and through our total humanity, both corporeal and mental; the implicit anthropology of Benedict sets aside the usual Greek hierarchical dualism of soma (the body as ‘tomb’) and psyche (the mind as spirit). The philosophy that loaned its terminology to Patañjali is also dualistic, although not necessarily hierarchical, but a larger view of yoga, with its insistence on bodily practices and (at least in the Bhagavad Gita) on the practical fulfillment of the duties of one’s state in life, leads beyond the philosophers’ dualism. Later yogic schools (called ‘tantric’) envision the yogi’s perfection not as liberation from the physical but as liberation within the physical, that is, within the flesh, the living cosmos, and time.

Benedict plays with the paradox of ascending and descending: God calls us up, but we are to respond by climbing down; only at the bottom do we reach the top. The various ‘degrees’ of humility do not fit easily into a hierarchical pattern, whether we read them abstractly or in line with the metaphor of the ladder. If we compare the first and last degrees, we rather see a movement from within to without, from the core of our consciousness to the movements and gestures of our body. We may indeed start with the first degree, that continual consciousness of God that the Bible calls ‘fear’. This fear of God is often improperly understood, but when we read it in the Psalms, we find it placed in parallel with words like ‘serving’, ‘worshipping’, and more commonly ‘seeking’ God: “Your face do I seek; hide not your face” (Psalm 26[27]:8). This fear is the equivalent of the Buddhist ‘mindfulness’ (smriti in Sanskrit, sati in Pali); as Benedict says, “Shun forgetfulness and always be mindful of what God teaches you” (RB7:10-11). This fear also has an emotional valence: “Keep thinking of the way people who despise God set Gehenna on fire by their sins and the way those who seek God reach the eternal life that God has prepared” (ibid.).

The twelfth step (RB7:62-66) on the ladder of humility is the body’s expression of the inner mindfulness inculcated in the first. While some novices purposely (perhaps presumptuously) adopt the outward gestures described here (head bowed, eyes cast down, whether sitting, walking, or standing), the authentic practice of this step is always the consequence of the first. However, as our personal monastic experience teaches us, the inner and the outer humility walk hand in hand. Indeed, says the Rule (ibid., verse 65), it is the gospel prayer of the Publican (Luke 18:13) that is the heart of the outward gestures of humility.

Perhaps we can connect the twelfth step with what the yoga traditions say about ‘posture’ (āsana). The connection cannot be traced on the physical plane, since ‘posture’ in the Yoga Sutras (YS2:46-48) is a preliminary condition for the other practices conducive to meditation. The instruction is simple: “Let your posture be steady and comfortable” (2:46). In practice, this means sitting on the ground, either on straw or on a cushion, so that one may maintain the position stably, without exerting conscious effort. Later texts, collectively referred to as hatha yoga, describe an uncountable variety of bodily positions, some indeed requiring vigorous exertion, but their link with the stability of meditative sitting is never totally forgotten. One may suggest that the degrees of humility and the postures of yoga meet in their groundedness and stability. Ultimately, they meet in the spirit of non-violence (ahimsā) and ‘abandonment to the Lord’. A yogi’s understanding of the word ‘Lord’ may differ from the common Christian understanding, but there is no question that Īshvara-pranidhāna is a gesture of profound humility.

A final word about RB4, “The Tools for Good Works,” whose genre as a list of aphorisms grants us license to compare it with Patañjali’s text. The chapter opens with a listing of the commandments, citing in part the decalogue of Moses, but enclosing it within the commandment of love (RB4:1-2) and the Golden Rule (RB4:9). This is pure Scripture and not specific to monastics; it functions here rather like the principle of harmlessness (ahimsā) that governs all the eight members of yoga.

In this chapter four of Benedict’s Rule, the phrase, “Love chastity” (verse 64), seems to echo a preceding aphorism: “Love fasting” (verse 13). The context of each aphorism is instructive. On the one hand, “Love fasting” is associated with the corporal and spiritual works of mercy: “Relieve the lot of the poor, clothe the naked, visit the sick, bury the dead, extend help to the troubled, and console the sorrowing” (verses 14-19). On the other hand, “Love chastity” is associated with the healing of relationships, and is followed by: “Harbor neither hatred nor jealousy of anyone, and do nothing out of envy; do not love quarreling; shun arrogance; respect the elders and love the young; pray for your enemies out of love for Christ” (verses 65-72). Hence, as fasting is a means of helping others in need, so chastity is a way of overcoming hatred, enmity, and jealousy. In neither case is the virtue presented as a means of control or repression.

Respecting the differences in literary genre, we can say that the Yoga Sutras and the Rule of Saint Benedict do overlap in some areas, and the basis of this overlapping is a partially-shared anthropological understanding. Let me say again: we are dealing with analogies of expression and experience, in texts that are both aimed at instituting a school of divine service, although they do not share a univocal concept of the divine. We can also affirm, without disparaging the traditions of yoga, that the Benedictine life is simply and integrally Christian, and it is predicated upon the New Testament teaching about salvation by grace through faith, hope, and love. This love, whose “inexpressible sweetness” Benedict promises to his beginners (RB Prologue, verse 49), is grounded and grows in community. My own observation of yoga schools in India and elsewhere, is that many of them lack this ‘cenobitic’ dimension. Nevertheless, the human heart was made to love, and when yoga fosters love, it also builds community relationships.

A VOW OF CONVERSATION

Thomas Merton always kept diaries. The reason was, I think, that he was a very fast reader; he would finish his obligatory, monastic lectio divina early in the day, and having nothing else to read, he would turn to writing a book for himself (Merton was also a fast writer).

Your diary is a lectio divina on your soul, but if you are a gifted writer, you will create a pagina (page) for others, a spin-off of the sacra pagina, the canonical Scriptures or the liturgy; you will also insert a page of your soul in between these sacred pages. A great diarist, having read the soul, writes about this self-lectio in such a way that intimate thoughts and feelings show their universal side and empower readers to read themselves while reading the diarist’s book.

The last, edited diary manuscript that Thomas Merton sent to his literary agent, Naomi Burton Stone, was entitled A Vow of Conversation.[1] Merton wanted the manuscript to be published no earlier than 1971, but when that year came, his voice had already been silenced by his untimely, accidental death in Bangkok, Thailand, on the 10th of December, 1968.

Looking through the Index of A Vow of Conversation, you find that references to Buddha or Buddhism are on only five of its 212 pages, but then, when you reach the end of the alphabet, you discover 21 pages that have to do with Zen or the great Zen scholar, D. T. Suzuki. Beyond these explicit references, Merton’s ongoing conversation with Buddhism is constantly implied in everything he says about his day-to-day life in the monastery.

In the opening entry of Merton’s diary, we can listen in on this implicit conversation with Buddhist monastic life.

January 1, 1964
Yesterday the year drew to a quiet curious end with an eclipse of the moon. The novices and I went out into the fierce zero cold and stood in the darkness of the garden while a last flake of light resisted for a long time the swallowing globe of dark. Then I went back to read Karl Jaspers’ book about Plato.
We have a Japanese fish kite made of red paper and Brother Dunstan stuck up some bamboo poles in the Zen garden. We will fly fish and streamers to celebrate the New Year.
The year of the dragon came in with sleet crackling on all the quiet windows. The year of the hare went out yesterday with our red fish kite twisting and flopping in the wind over the Zen garden. Today, a cold gray afternoon. Much snow. Woods, bright with snow, loom out of the dark. Totally new vision of the Vineyard Knob. Dark, etched out with snow, standing in obscurity and in a kind of strange spaciousness that I had never observed before.
The wide sweep of snow on St. Benedict’s field. I climbed the Lake Knob. Wonderful woods. Slid down the steep hillside in the snow. Tore my pants on barbed wire. Came back through the vast fields and drifts of snow. Peace![2]

A few days before Merton’s departure on his fateful voyage to Asia, Mrs. Stone sent him a letter about the manuscript; the letter contains a significant, Freudian slip, where she refers to the diary with the title “Vow of Silence,” rather than “Vow of Conversation.”[3]

It is often said that Trappist monks — Merton was a Trappist — take a vow of silence. This is not exactly true, but in Merton’s day Trappists were required to communicate with each other, outside of confessions or chapter meetings, only by means of an elaborate system of manual signs. Monks like Merton, of a loquacious and jovial nature, acquired great skill in sign language and could indeed carry on conversations, obeying the letter of the law of silence but not its spirit, or rather, obeying the spirit of a higher law, in accordance with which, monks are to live in a constant act of conversation.

We all know from experience, even the most loquacious of us, that conversation means more than just talking. It is first of all a relationship between two or more talkers, who agree on the tacit terms of a shared belonging and a shared process of living. I cannot converse with a person who, although perhaps physically present or on the other end of a telephone or Skype connection, does not share my mental and/or spiritual space and process. If the other is mentally somewhere else, or heading in a direction opposite or tangential to mine, we cannot engage in conversation. At most, we either talk at each other or past each other.

I have said that monastics are mandated to observe a higher law, in accordance with which they are to live in a constant act of conversation. Keep in mind that when speaking of ‘conversation’, the phrase ‘constant act’ is redundant. ‘Conversation’ comes from the Latin verbal noun conversatio and ultimately from the verb conversari, which is what they call a ‘frequentative verb’, one that denotes a repeated action. In everyday use, conversatio meant going about in the same place and with the same company. You can tell how easy it was to move from this Latin usage to that of the French and English word: you keep company with a certain group of people and you frequently engage in conversation with them.

In monastic usage, conversatio meant associating with monks and interacting with them in the monastery. Actually the word meant more than this, and on account of its larger meaning, it became the central vow of monastics in the Rule of Saint Benedict. I shall quote the Rule from the translation given in the volume, Benedict’s Dharma: Buddhists Reflect on the Rule of Saint Benedict.[4]

Here is the key text from chapter 58, paragraph 4: “When the decision is made that novices are to be accepted, then they come before the whole community in the oratory [the place of daily community prayer and of silent, individual prayer] to make solemn promise of stability, fidelity to monastic life and obedience.”[5] Here you have the three Benedictine vows, the first and the third each being expressed with a single word, which in English is a cognate of the Latin: stabilitas and oboedientia. The middle vow is a phrase that includes our key term, ‘conversation’: promittat de… conversatione morum suorum. I give you a literal rendering: “Let the novices make a promise about… conversation of their own mores.”

The meaning of the vow is not immediately clear. My translation of it is surely more arcane than the original Latin, but actually I am following the principle of strict ‘formal equivalence’ that the Holy See is now imposing on translators of Roman Catholic liturgies and papal instructions, perhaps with the intent of making the translations suitably arcane. What about the word ‘mores’? This is a straight-out Latin word, actually a plural, which the American Heritage Dictionary[6]  defines as follows: “1. The accepted traditional customs and usages of a particular social group. 2. Moral attitudes. 3. Manners; ways.” Which of these three definitions is applicable here depends on how you interpret the other term, ‘conversation’. But first it depends on that possessive pronoun, ‘their own’, referring to the novice or novices, and so we are pointed toward definitions 2. and 3.

It seems, from the formula of monastic promises, that each novice is bringing his or her own moral attitudes, manners, and ways into conformity with the accepted customs and traditional usages of the monastic social group. The Benedict’s Dharma translation of the Rule seems to convey this idea in its phrase, “fidelity to monastic life.” The only problem is, the Latin conversatio, like the French-English ‘conversation’, does not mean ‘fidelity’. Monastics in Saint Benedict’s day (the early sixth century of the Common Era) always understood conversatio in connection with the verb it ultimately derived from, which is convertere, ‘turn round, turn in the opposite direction, turn back, whirl around’, and then, in Christian writers, ‘change, alter, refresh,’ and of course, ‘convert’. The frequentative form of the verb, conversari, suggested the idea of continuing to do, over and over again, what the root verb was about. Keep on turning, keep on changing, refresh every day, and so on.

I think the abbot who did the translation for Benedict’s Dharma wanted to give the same meaning to the second vow as to the first and the third. Certainly, the vow of stability suggests lifelong fidelity to the traditional customs and usages of the persons living in this particular monastery; you could say that its meaning is static and horizontal. ‘Obedience’ also seems static (do what you’re told, no more and no less) and vertical (the abbot gives the orders, and the monks carry them out without delay). The middle vow, however, has to mean something dynamic, not static, and horizontal, not vertical, or in other words, “Change and refresh your moral attitudes, your manners, and your ways in a lifelong conversation with your fellow monastics’ customs and usages.”

This same chapter 58 of the Rule opens with the phrase, Noviter veniens quis ad conversationem (there’s that key word again), which you can translate, “When someone newly arrives to join in the conversation, don’t make it too easy for them to get in.” Not only the abbot but also the elder monk who is put in charge of the novices should use careful discernment; they should also be good at “winning souls,” that is, gaining the novices’ attention and confidence.

Saint Benedict gives the novices plenty of time to decide whether and when to make their solemn promises of monastic vows. The actual duration of the time is immaterial; in the sixth century, life was short and a full year was enough, while in the twenty-first, at least five years are needed. Whoever the novice is, and whatever the larger context of his or her petition to enter the monastery, the monastic elders must be discreet, and both the elders and the novices must exercise discernment.

With these two virtues, ‘discretion’ and “discernment’, I come to another important term in the monastic vocabulary: discretio, which translates both English words. The opposite of this is praesumptio, which means presumption or taking things for granted. This is the vice of those who are indiscreet and undiscerning, who take for granted their own understanding of how things are or ought to be. Discretio is enormously important for monastics: it governs their practice of other monastic virtues, like humility and silence, and it guides even their practice of the vows of obedience and stability. Over the course of many years in the monastery, one’s practice of these static vows may degenerate into rigidity; against this degeneration, discretio brings into play the dynamic virtue of the middle vow, conversatio, making it the key to authentic monastic practice.

Within the Benedictine tradition, we have a rich treasure of hagiographical texts that elaborate on Scriptural themes and re-narrate Bible stories through the events and inner experiences of monastic saints. One of these is Romuald of Ravenna, the patron saint of the Camaldolese. His story was told, with parsimony although not with much historical accuracy, by Peter Damian, doctor of the Church, also a Benedictine hermit born in Ravenna. For Peter Damian, Romuald was to be considered the ‘adoptive father’ of the monks of his community at Fonte Avellana, an austere brotherhood that combined the Benedictine Rule with a return to the spirit of the Desert Elders of Egypt.
Peter Damian’s narrative is a study in contrasts and a call to growth for both individual monks and communities small and great; commentators often see in his hagiographical writings (i.e., lives of saints) a project for reforming the whole church. His story of Romuald’s growth in virtue and spiritual realization begins with an image of him as a novice.[7]

[After a few months in the monastery, the abbey of Sant’Apollinare in Classe,] Romuald began to realize that some of the monks were strolling down the broad path to perdition, while his heart was set on the narrow gate that leads to life. Romuald knew he had to follow his heart, but this did not seem possible at Sant’Apollinare. “What should I do?” he asked himself, and a thousand thoughts beat upon his soul like the waves of a winter storm.
With hard words Romuald presumed to denounce the easy ways of the monks, and he exposed their faults through repeated references to the Rule. But the more he insisted, the less attention they paid to him. “After all, he is only a young novice,” they said. In the end their tolerance was exhausted, and they could bear his reproofs no longer. They set about plotting to kill him.
Romuald was accustomed to rise early, before the monks got up for their nightly vigil, and when he found the doors of the church locked, he would say his prayers in the dormitory. Now the dormitory was on the second floor of the abbey and looked out over the cloister. At the devil’s prompting, these sons of Cain decided that the next time Romuald started reciting his prayers in the dormitory, they would throw him headlong over the railing to the pavement below.
Hearing them discuss this plot, one of the brothers warned Romuald. So he shut the door of his mouth and began to pray to his Father in silence, in the secret chamber of his heart. And thus he was safe; he avoided being cast down bodily into the cloister garth, and he kept the monks’ souls from falling into the abyss of mortal sin.[8]

A later chapter in Peter Damian’s story shows us another Romuald, no longer a presumptuous novice but a discreet and discerning elder, an ex-abbot, for he was briefly forced by the teen-age emperor Otto III to accept the crozier of his home abbey. He renounced the office, and from then on he was just Master Romuald, exercising no ecclesiastical jurisdiction but rather instructing monastics and lay people with his gentle and disconcerting charism.

Once, while he was reading the Lives of the Desert Elders, Romuald came upon the passage about the brothers who used to fast in their hermitage from Monday through Friday, and then on Saturday and Sunday would come together for common meals, at which a greater variety and quantity of food was served. So from then on, for fifteen years or so, Romuald followed this practice without interruption.
But [his disciple] Peter, [the former doge of Venice,] long accustomed as he was to a rich diet, found this regime of fasting too heavy, and his health was failing. So he went and humbly cast himself at Romuald’s feet. Romuald made him stand, and Peter, with great embarrassment, revealed his need for a more generous diet. “Father,” he said, “I do want to do penance for my sins, but with my heavy build, I can’t get by with half a loaf of dry bread.” Romuald, moved by paternal compassion toward Peter, gave him another quarter loaf from his own supply of bread.
Thus he held out a hand of mercy to a brother who was failing on the way, so that with renewed strength, he might more easily follow the path he had chosen.…[9]
Regarding total fasting—eating nothing all day—although he himself often practiced it, he absolutely forbade it to his disciples. “If you want to grow continually in your monastic commitment,” he said, “then the best kind of fasting means eating every day and feeling hungry every day. If you practice fasting with discretion, what seems hard at first will become easier.” Romuald had no use for monks who started out doing heavy penance, and then weren’t able to keep it up.
About staying up at night to pray he was very cautious. What he did not want anyone to do was to stay up and then fall asleep at dawn, after the night vigil. He had no patience for those who couldn’t stay awake in the morning. If someone confessed he had gone back to sleep after the Vigil of Twelve Psalms or worse yet at sunup, Romuald would not let him sing Mass that day.
“Better to sing one Psalm with feeling,” he said, “than to recite a hundred with a wandering mind. But if you haven’t yet received the grace of singing from your heart, do not give up hope. Be constant in your practice, and one day He who gave you the desire for the prayer of the heart will give you that prayer itself.
“When your heart’s intention is fixed on God, it will keep lit the incense of your prayer, and the wind of distraction will not put it out. Do not worry about stray thoughts; they may come and go, but they will not take your attention away from God.”[10]

So Romuald is now the very model of Benedictine discretio, for he sees spiritual practice in terms of quality, not quantity, centered above all in the heart. This is also the Middle Way, on which Buddha Dharma invites us to walk.

By way of conclusion: Romuald enacts the central Benedictine vow in a dynamic way, through conversation with his fellow monastics. His presumptuous fault-finding while a novice at Sant’Apollinare in Classe was not a genuine conversation: Romuald was talking at the monks, not with them. By experience, especially by the experience of his own and others’ weaknesses, he becomes a compassionate teacher. The skill that he learned over many years as a monk is what Saint Benedict called “The good zeal that monks ought to have,” the title of Benedict’s next-to-last chapter in his Rule. In earlier chapters he has warned against what here he calls the “zeal of bitterness,” the harshness of zealots who presume to judge others and set themselves up as superior in virtue to them. Let me quote the whole chapter:

Just as there is a bad zeal of bitterness that separates from God and leads to hell, so there is a good zeal that separates from evil and leads to God and everlasting life. This, then, is the good zeal that monastics must foster with fervent love: They should try to be the first to show respect to the other (Romans 12:10), supporting with the greatest patience one another’s weaknesses of body or mores, and earnestly competing in obedience to one another. You are not to pursue what you judge better for yourself, but instead, what you judge better for someone else. To your fellow monastics show the pure love of siblings; to God, reverence and love; to your abbot, unfeigned and humble love. Prefer nothing whatever to Christ, and may Christ bring us all together to everlasting life.[11]

NOTES

1. New York: Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, 1988.
2. Ibid., p. 3.
3. Quoted in her preface to the published diary, p. vii.
4. Edited by Patrick Henry (New York: Riverhead Books, 2001); the translation of the Rule is the work of Abbot Patrick Barry, OSB. My citations of the original Latin text will be from RB 1980: The Rule of Saint Benedict In Latin and English with Notes, edited by Timothy Fry OSB (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1981.
5. Benedict‘s Dharma, p. 204.
6. Fourth Edition, 2006.
7. I have translated this and other texts and commented upon them in Thomas Matus, The Mystery of Romuald and the Five Brothers: Stories from the Benedictines & Camaldolese (Big Sur: Hermitage Books, 1994).
8. Matus, op.cit, p. 177.
9. Ibid., pp. 185-186.
10. Ibid., pp. 187-188.
11. RB 1980, pp. 292-294.

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will offer a two-pronged approach to interreligious dialogue: a) reading primary sources in the Vedas, especially with regard to the Divine Mother image of the deity, and subsequent tradition and b) reflection on them in the light of lived experience. The course will emphasize the ecclesial nature of interreligious dialogue (see Vatican II, Nostra Aetate), and will examine this dimension in Blessed Teresa of Calcutta’s non-dual experience of the Absolute (advaita) through her service to the poor and the dying destitute as she lived a practical and contemplative form of interreligious dialogue. Her mystical experience and her positive relationship with Hindus and others will be compared with the life and teaching of a contemporary Hindu woman mystic, Anandamayi Ma. Students will recognize the interplay between faith and culture in addressing the theological and/or pastoral issues that emerge in the Hindu cultural context. Students will be invited to share, and reflect upon, their own interreligious connections. Lecture/Discussion. One-page reflection for each class meeting except the first, plus a final paper. This course fulfills the requirement for course credits in inter- religious dialogue and history of religions.

COURSE GOALS
The students will read, study, and critically reflect upon, the interfaith context and relations of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, Anandamayi Ma, and others, in the light of the Catholic Church’s view of, and relationship with, these faiths and their adherents. The students will explore how people today, in contact with persons of faith belonging to various traditions, can through dialogue deepen their own life of faith and spiritual journey.

COURSE MATERIALS: Daily required readings will be posted on Moodle (40-60 pages); a bibliography will be provided, plus the following:

Thomas Matus. Ashram Diary: In India With Bede Griffiths. Washington D.C.: O Books, 2009. ISBN 978 1 84694 161 0

Thomas Matus. Yoga and the Jesus Prayer. Washington D.C.: O Books, 2010. ISBN 978 1 84694 285 3

I—A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE CHURCH’S ATTITUDE/RELATIONSHIP with regard to other faiths and spiritual traditions. Dialogue as an ecclesial practice and as a personal commitment, in the spirit of a critical fidelity to Catholic tradition, as expressed in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, especially Nostra Aetate. In what way, and to what degree, have Hindu sacred texts become part of twentieth-century Western culture? [Read Nostra Aetate; understand how interreligious dialogue is integral to the Church’s mission, in service of the faith that does justice].

II—THE UNCLEAR AND INDISTINCT CONCEPTS OF BOTH ‘RELIGION’ AND ‘HINDUISM’ in the context of the Church’s own efforts to affirm her own, and Christ’s, ‘uniqueness’ [Read selections from Zaehner, Hinduism; Panikkar, The Vedic Experience; reflect on the range of texts held as sacred by Hindus as well as on so-called ‘heterodox’ traditions in India: Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism; see also Dominus Jesus and subsequent debate].

III—HINDUISM AS A WAY OF ‘SEEING’ (DARSANA): image and word in Indian religious traditions as compared to Christianity; the feminine image of God in Hindu Texts and in the Christian revelation [Read from Eck, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in Hinduism; Hawley and Wulff, Devi: Goddesses of India; Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother; Panikkar, The Vedic Experience].

IV—THE WEST AND CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO RECENT HINDUISM: the social condition of women in India and female voices of Hinduism in today’s context, against the backdrop of the nineteenth-century Hindu revival [Read from Bumiller, May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons. Reflect on the renewal of Hinduism through the Brahmo Samaj, Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda and the founding of the first Hindu ‘religious order’; Sri Aurobindo; Ramana Maharshi and the quest for the Self; read from Zaehner, op.cit.; Heehs, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo; Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi; Lipski, Anandamayi Ma].

V—GURU AND DISCIPLE: The non-hierarchical transmission of India’s civilization and spiritual teachings through lineages of gurus; the new lineages established by Anandamayi Ma and other recent gurus [Read from Lipski, Anandamayi Ma; reflect critically on cultural and spiritual transmission in the West in general and in the Catholic Church in particular; reflect also on the changing image of a ‘guru’ in modern Hinduism and in the West].

VI—SANNYASA AND YOGA, or ‘Renunciation’ and ‘Integration’ as inherent elements of the inner dynamic of Indian spirituality [Read passages from the Bhagavad Gita and from Ashram Diary; examine the historical and spiritual link between sannyasa and yoga, and between Hinduism and Buddhism].

VII—SYNCRETISM AND INCULTURATION: ‘Syncretism’ as intrinsic to Hinduism in general. Hindu worship of Jesus. Was Blessed Teresa’s ascetical practice and Christian devotion in the Indian context a form of ‘inculturation’? [Reflect on translated passages from Germani, Il pensiero di Teresa di Calcutta; Matus, Ashram Diary; reflect on the practice of ‘Oriental techniques’ in the West: Matus, Yoga and the Jesus Prayer].

VIII—NON-DUAL EXPERIENCE AND THE SERVICE OF THE POOR: Blessed Teresa’s life as a comment on Abhishiktananda’s and Bede Griffiths’ understanding of Vedanta and Christian doctrine; did she attain an authentic ‘non-dual’ experience of the Absolute, and is her experience a form of ‘syncretism’? [Read from Germani, Il pensiero di Teresa di Calcutta; Abhishiktananda, Saccidananda: A Christian Approach to Advaitic Experience; reflect on the difficulties of connecting Hindu and Christian thought at the conceptual level].

IX—NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR AN EXPERIENTIAL APPROACH TO HINDUISM through the practice of contemplative virtues and active service. [Read from Germani, Il pensiero di Teresa di Calcutta; Matus, Yoga and the Jesus Prayer; understand how a Christian’s opening to Hinduism can lead to absorption of Hindu elements into one’s global vision as a Christian].

X—VARIOUS THEOLOGICAL HYPOTHESES on Hinduism and other traditions in relation to human salvation by, through, and in Jesus Christ [no class session, but these questions and hypotheses must be examined by reading from one or more of the following authors: Karl Rahner; Jacques Dupuis; Jules Monchanin; Abhishiktananda; Clooney, Divine Mother, Blessed Mother].

Human skill accomplished their liberation, just as the medical and other skills of health professionals had preserved their physical and psychological well-being during the weeks the exit hole was being drilled and the equipment was being constructed. Techno-logic explains all the physical aspects of this accomplishment.

It would not be human, nor would the miners and their rescuers be honored, were we to stop here and not consider the imponderable dimensions of this historical event. In one news cycle it played itself out, and today’s internet-press postings speak of other things, both important and frivolous.

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” said the poet T.S. Eliot in two of his works (Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets). We cannot bear the reality of those 17 days after the mine collapse, during which no one above knew they were all alive, and they did not know whether or how they would be looked for by potential rescuers. The men prayed briefly every day; perhaps the more devout among them prayed constantly in the quiet of their souls.

I do not have to speak, nor do I wish to speak, of “God’s hand” guiding miners and rescuers toward this successful conclusion. But I have to see in them and in their rescue a sort of “eucatastrophy” — a word that J.R.R. Tolkien used to characterize the ending of his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, a person of faith, chose not to mention God in the book, but let the narrative (which he insisted was not an allegory of anything natural or supernatural) show its ultimate meaning through the ending: the catastrophic collapse of evil power through the weaker force of the good.

It is not necessary to name an evil entity (like Sauron, or the reign of Mordor, or the magic of the ring of power) in the causality of the miners’ entrapment. Enormous lacks were there, sins of omission if you wish, like lack of security in the mines, or the very fact of basing so much of the economy of Chile and the world upon copper and gold, the metals that the men down there were sent to extract. The men themselves were weak, some physically and some psychologically (just ordinary “Hobbits” one might call them). Their ultimate fate was sealed — literally — in stone, and Murphy’s law prevailed for the most part. But the evil ending of the story was upended and catastrophically reversed through the archetypal and perinatal symbolism of the narrow passage and the emergence into light: rebirth and resurrection.

Wearied news media have tried to forget this imponderable sign-value of the rescue, because the persons and market forces that direct the media cannot bear the reality that the event patently projects upon the conscience of anyone who will gaze at its light. The miners will keep their sunglasses on for a few more days; the techno-logic of our culture will keep its gaze turned away, as usual. A minority of persons will utter the G-word and explain thereby the event, and I will bear with their God-talk, which as a person of faith I sometimes use myself.

But I want to bear this “very much reality” and will try to do so through silent contemplation of the simple fact of thirty-three men who suffered no harm from their entrapment and did no harm to one another while awaiting liberation from it.

The main difference between Matt Segall and myself, is that he may, as you say, labor under a misunderstanding of the current accomplishments of neuroscience, while I must admit, not just to misunderstanding, but to ignorance. I do not grasp neuroscience, therefore I am an ignoramus (Latin, actually first-person plural, meaning “we are unaware”). Yet I know a few things, enough to know my ignorance and to question convictions and certitudes, mine and your own, which, pardon my bluntness, are more dogmatic than scientific.

You, Steve, set out to “convince” Matt and your other readers “that neuroscientist’s [sic] are actually doing a fantastic job at figuring out the nitty gritty of consciousness, that it resides solely in the brain, and that it can be explained solely through brain activity.”

I shall indeed take the time to read some of the sources that you indicate, and perhaps they will dispel some of the clouds of ignorance that obfuscate my awareness. In the meantime, I do perceive, in this trying to “convince” people, the evangelical posture of an ardent believer in the fantastic job and the current doing of it. But were I a scientist, I should not be so confident that the job has already been done, and that neuroscience has reached the point at which one can employ the most unscientific of adverbs, “solely”: solely in the brain, solely through brain activity.

Science, in my modest understanding, speaks the language of mathematics; scientific knowledge gives us quantities, not qualities. I only ask the scientist not to deny to the knowledge of qualities the title of true knowledge, especially in three areas that are of particular interest to me: music, love, and mysticism. Set aside the third, if you wish, but leave me at least music.

A developing area of study is that of musical cognition, and here neuroscience and evolutionary biology can shed amazing light on the musical experience. Human musical expression has evolved enormously, alongside science and often in dialogue with it. I cannot say that the music of Bach and Mozart is “better” than that of Toru Takemitsu and Sofia Gubaidulina (two favorites of mine), but certainly the music of the latter two has “evolved” in complexity/consciousness from the earlier maestros.

Gubaidulina’s concertos show their debt to Mozart’s perfection of musical form; she sometimes quotes Bach. Yet she speaks a musical language that addresses my membership in twenty-first-century humanity, although I cannot tell how this is so. I can analyze her forms and her counterpoint (music has, after all, strong affinities with mathematics); you could analyze the firing of my neurons with her music in my ears. But a way of knowing is there for me, which neither my formal analysis nor your brain scans can pin down.

There is an endless excess in human knowing to which scientific measurement can never mark an end-point. All knowledge is approximate; scientists elude this messiness of human knowing and the fuzziness of human logic by reducing observed data to number. I know that “fuzzy logic” is being studied by computer scientists; I am vaguely aware of chaos theory. But both disciplines still need the math.

Music has its math side, like all knowing, but it has another and ultimately inexplicable side that will never be reduced to numbers because it is constantly expanding (I don’t say, “progressing”). Gubaidulina’s struggle with the interactions of tempered and non-tempered tuning (e.g., her recent orchestral work “Light at the End”) starts with Herz-numbers (cycles per second) but takes us into a realm that is numberless and that corresponds with the “potential infinity” of human consciousness, while suggesting that another music, now being written or yet to be written, will go beyond hers, great as it is.

Raimundo Panikkar (ed. and transl.). The Vedic Experience, Mantramañjarī: An Anthology of the Vedas… London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977.

Gloria Germani. Il pensiero di Teresa di Calcutta: Una mistica tra Oriente e Occidente. Milano: Paoline Editoriale Libri, 2000.

Alexander Lipski. Life and teaching of Sri Anandamayi Ma. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977.

Jacques Dupuis. Christianity and the Religions: From Confrontation to Dialogue. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 2002.

People have been looking for this out-of-print book for years now, and copies have been put up on on eBay and Amazon for ridiculous prices: 70 or 80 dollars. Now for just $22.95 ( or even less, with Amazon’s discount) you can read my comparison of Tantric Yoga and Greek Orthodox mysticism, or better said, my parallel reading of the tenth-century yogis of Kashmir and a Byzantine saint from the same period, to see where their respective experiences may converge.

In this new edition I also share some of my personal experience of yoga practice and meditation as a disciple of the disciples of Paramahansa Yogananda and later as a Christian monk in Big Sur, Italy, and India.

During the retreat I gave the weekend before last, at the Camaldolese hermitage in Big Sur, I drew on this book, focusing on the theme of kundalini awakening as a fire sacrifice. We meditated together, with the help of a simple breathing practice taught in the ancient Vjñana-Bhairava Tantra, and at the center of our meditations was the sacrifice of Jesus, made present in the daily Mass celebrated with the monks.

Cover of the new book (O Books)

You could say that New Camaldoli has more in common with Shantivanam than with Mr. Hearst’s hideaway, even though the monks who pray and work there are in the lineage of the Medieval saints Benedict and Romuald, transmitted through the Renaissance-era monks Ambrose Traversari and Paul Giustiniani.

New Camaldoli lives from a real, not imaginary past. Like the Ashram in southern India, the Big Sur Hermitage challenges our present with prophetic hope, grounded in the Genesis promise. Both witness to a cross-cultural present, in view of a future inter-spirituality, whose outline can be sketched from lines that lead back to Bible and Gospel, as well as to the sages of ancient India.

Jules Monchanin, Swami Paramarupyananda, foresaw a reciprocal Advent of the Church in India and of India in the Church. He knew that the new birth in which this Advent was to culminate had to include Yoga, but he wrestled with doubts about the classical Indian texts on Yoga. As a young disciple of the yogi-guru Yogananda, I struggled with doubts about Church dogmas and structures. But when I realized that she was a mystical body and a mother-guru, who welcomed me into her embrace, I found Monchanin’s prophetic hope a source of comfort and insight.

In these years since I joined the monks in Big Sur (forty-eight years this Friday), God’s grace and my own study and practice of Yoga have led me beyond his and my doubts. This weekend, I shall share some thoughts on Yoga with a group of retreatants in Big Sur. Usually the Hermitage offers only silent, individual retreats, but a few times a year, a facilitator from Big Sur or Berkeley offers moments of group reflection and meditation on a specific theme.

“Yoga and Sacrifice” can trouble us like “Church and India”: for many people, Hindu or Christian or whatever, Yoga liberates the human spirit from sacrificial religion, that is, from ritual purity and deontological morality. If we pay attention to the Gospel, we find that Jesus also offers liberation, as when he teaches that love of God and neighbor contains and transcends “Law and Prophets” and when he tells us to leave our sacrifices and first go seek reconciliation with anyone who has something against us, and only then to make our offering to God.

Now I am going to upload a short video on YouTube, sketching out the retreat theme. Come join me there: do a search for thomasmatus, and click on the latest upload.