Philosophy 33

In a classroom I see my job as presenting a way to look at the material that you are otherwise becoming familiar with through your reading.  That means I am being very selective in what I talk about, and it is probably best that you read the appropriate chapters beforehand.  Then, after going over what I say, read those chapters again and also check out additional material available through the Internet.  You might also want to follow my suggestions for still other activities (films, visits, etc.)

I am organizing these lectures in this way:  first, there will be a general discussion of the subject; after I have had a chance to read some of the things you might say back to me (whether directly through an email message or through a posting in the discussion group) there will be some afterthoughts.  I am keeping all of this on a single webpage.  To move through the page, click on the link in the table below.  You will find that some of the names and concepts allow links to other sources.  Use your back button to return here. (I would like you to discourage you from just printing out these lectures.  Read them online and do make use of the links.)

Please alert me if there are broken links below.

WHY ARE THERE RELIGIONS?

There was a time, starting about a century and a half back, when some very brilliant individuals thought they had explained religion.  First there was Auguste Comte, who traced human thought about nature from a theological to a metaphysical to a scientific ("positive") stage.  Then there was Karl Marx, who saw institutional religion as a basis for class exploitation.  And then came Sigmund Freud, who saw religion as an illusion allowing us to overcome the fear of death.

Other scientists, particularly Sir James Frazer and Bronislaw Malinowski, detailed how religions work, and again the impression remained that in explaining the origin of religion we also explained the phenomenon away.

The point is that religions are a dominant feature of any cultural landscape and so they cannot be ignored in attempting to understand individuals affected by them.  Religious language and symbolism are integral to so much of our art and literature that for this reason alone we should become more familiar with them.

But what do we mean by this word "religion"?  That is a very big problem.  If we start out with the religions we are already most familiar with in American culture, we might say they have certain things in common, such as the idea of God and some set of practices by which we attempt to save our souls by following God's law.  But then we hit a roadblock, since not all religions are monotheistic (accepting a single divinity) and some might be classified as atheistic (not accepting any divinity).  Not all religions accept the immortality of the soul, so that the idea of salvation fades away.

I encourage you to use the approach to language presented by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who argued for a "family resemblances" approach.  Imagine you are at a family reunion and you can see definite characteristics appearing with those who are there: many have the same eyes or ears or chins, but none seem to have all of these.  Instead there are overlapping sets of these characteristics.  In the same way we can classify religions according to certain characteristics without necessarily seeing them as having any one of these characteristics in common.

As we go on I will talk more about these characteristics.  I will also try to make use of certain concepts or categories that let us compare different religious traditions.  One of these is the concept of spirituality, best understood as a personal effort to relate to that which is "beyond" everyday experience.  Another is the concept of an institution, such as a church in which we talk about individuals coming together in some manner.  One of the most interesting ideas coming up is how these two can either reinforce each other or be at war with each other.

A couple of ideas that I would like to start with are these.  (1) Following the French philosopher Henri Bergson I do like to think of there being two sources for morality and religion.  One is the need to set limits on the individual so that religion enshrines values that hold a society together.  The other is the urge to transcendence that above all appears with the charismatic individuals (Gautama, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad) seen as founders of the great world religions we talk about today.  (2) The similarity of stories and practices might easily create the impression that there is no "true" religion, a thought very offensive to many who are "believers."  To avoid problems I am fond of citing what I call the Eusebius principle, which I name after the early Christian bishop who commented that the similarities among the mystery religions of his time were simply the manner in which God prepared the way for the Gospel.  I use it to mean that the similarities can be understood by the nonbeliever one way and by the believer in a very different way.  Obviously there is no outside "third" way of saying who would be correct.

As you read through the material in the second chapter, note the way in which there seems to be a direct connection between how complex a culture is and how institutionalized religion is within the culture.  In particular, look at the extent to which there are specialists in religious practices.  In a relatively simple culture every individual is more or less on equal footing since everyone dreams and so everyone might have visions.  In a more complex culture we have shamans with a distinctive ability to interact with the spirit world.  In a very complex culture personal visions of any kind are downplayed in favor of set patterns of divination, but this easily sets up a situation in which the good of the soul seems to be downplayed. Our world religions have their roots in very complex cultures which were ready for the kind of person we label the visionary or the mystic.

Another thing I want you to note is that in a tribal setting our modern notion of belief does not play much of a role.  This is one reason why today there can be a greater acceptance, as in Hawaii, of indigenous practices as cultural expressions.

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WHAT IS HINDUISM?

Hinduism, as we talk about the main religion of India, is often compared to a mighty river into which are flowing many tributaries.  It is also compared to a tree with many branches.  With a history of more than three thousand years in a country of some five hundred languages, Hinduism is not going to be some one easily defined system of beliefs and practices.  Instead it is a myriad of cults, and what is called Hindu philosophy itself is traditionally seen as comprised of six major schools that differ markedly in their approach.

What we need to start with is the recognition that India has been invaded repeatedly.  The most important invasion for our story is that of those who called themselves the Aryas, the lords.  This was  a nomadic tribe whose origins are somewhere up in the steppes of Russia, and those who came to India were cultural cousins of the Greeks and the Romans and the Celts and the Teutons--all the groups that invaded Europe back in the second millennium.  Sanskrit, the early language of the invader still preserved as a sacred language for rituals (just as Latin once was for the descendants of the Romans in the Catholic Church) is one of a number of Indo-European languages with a writing system developed early in the first millennium.

Click on here for more about the history and culture of India.  This is a page you may want to bookmark for future reference.

In the conquest of India what may have been a cultural pattern of social separation in the Harappa culture of the third millennium was taken over and made ever more rigid.  The invaders and those who held parallel positions in the areas that accepted them were seen as fitting into the three main castes of priests (brahmanas), warriors (kshyatriyas), and merchants (vaisyas).  Males in these castes were the twice-born, with reference to a ceremony by which boys in their teens were ritually accepted as adults.  Most individuals would be in the caste of laborers (shudras), and many would be below that even as "untouchables," assigned the tasks that would involve a sense of contamination.

The castes (varnas) are the general labels, but the real identification is in terms of occupational specialties (jatis). Mohandas Gandhi, for example, was born as a bania (grocer) in the vaisya caste, even though in India his father was in government and Gandhi himself became a lawyer.  Marriage--arranged by the parents, which has led to severe problems in the treatment of women-- ideally is between children in the same jati, and although a woman might marry a man of a higher caste a man cannot marry upwards.  Those who violated these and other important restrictions traditionally slipped into the status of being "untouchables."

Be sure to read more about Gandhi, who learned the value of nonviolence (ahimsa) as a child in the Jain community and later as a spiritual leader demanded that the former untouchables be referred to as harijan--the children of God.

The caste system is tied in with the concept of reincarnation: individuals have numerous lifetimes, and social mobility is achieved not in the present life but in a future one, when, for example, the merchant who has performed his caste-assigned duties (his dharma) might be reborn as a warrior, just as the negligent warrior might be reborn as a merchant.  The ultimate goal is seen as an upward movement through the priestly caste to a stage of freedom (moksha) beyond the need to be reborn.  For the twice-born Hindu male, there would be an ideal (seldom realized in practice) of different life stages beginning and ending with more intense religious practices, and for the adult in the stage of the householder there would be the key values of duty (dharma), success (artha), pleasure (kama), and spiritual freedom (mokhsa).

Hindu religious practices initially were codified in four sets of documents (vedas)--a set of sacred chants (rig veda) along with a set of rituals and a set of directions for chanting, and a set of what we might think of as magical spells (atharva veda).  The deities we meet in the Rig Veda are those of the invading aryas--above all, gods of the sky and weather.  There is also a hymn to a consciousness-altering beverage called soma, identified by some scholars today as a drink made with the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria.

What happens quickly enough after the invasion is that the sky-oriented cults of the invaders begin to merge with the earth-oriented cults of the peoples already there.  In time, the cults of Krishna and Shiva assume new prominence, and a more complex mythology emerges that preserves polytheism while still moving toward a more mystical outlook.  New religious teachers (gurus) who would be seen as having achieved some personal stage of enlightenment added to the body of sacred literature with the Upanishads (from the Sanskrit for sitting at someone's feet).  A key notion is the idea that all of us are ultimately expressions of an absolute reality (Brahman), as in the phrase tat tvam asi ("you are that which is"): the underlying spiritual self or soul of each of us (atman) is the same as Brahman, and the goal is to get past that which creates the awareness of difference.

Still later the key philosophical movements of Samkhya, Yoga and Vedanta are developed.  Samkhya and Yoga are dualist in the sense they assume there is the ever-existing world of nature (prakriti) and the ever-existing world of spirit (purusha), and the path to moksha is achieved by systematically reversing the way in which our individual purusha (think of it like the platinum in an automobile's catalytic converter, something that allows a reaction without itself being changed) has permitted the organization of our nature.  Vedanta is typically monist, meaning that there is but one ultimate reality (Brahman) and the plural objects of our conscious experience are ultimately illusory (maya).

The teachings of the gurus were necessarily elitist, since they were presented as secret or esoteric teachings for the twice-born.  Religion at the popular level remained polytheistic, but the notion that only a select few could escape the wheel of rebirth was not always acceptable to individuals looking for spiritual growth.  Reform movements that broke with the Vedas, such as the Jains and the Buddhists, offered two ways of life: a fairly ordinary but morally restrained life for most people that still did away with caste restrictions and another, far more ascetic way of life for those who would become monks.  Both reforms focused on how some human beings either became divine (as with the 24 deities of the Jains) or were incarnations of a divine reality (as in Buddhism, which is the subject of the following lecture).

The Hindu response, sometime around the beginning of the first millennium CE, was the elevation of the Krishna cult to a new status through the mystical narrative known as the Blessed Lord's song (Bhagavad Gita).  Krishna, a warrior fighting alongside his lifelong friend Arjuna, deals with Arjuna's question of conscience about how he could go into battle against his own relatives. Krishna's answer is to follow the path of action (karma yoga), an ethics of unselfish observance of the duties of one's caste.  A still higher path, however, is to do everything out of a personal devotion (bhakti) to himself, since in reality he is the incarnation of the god Vishnu, who sustains the universe.

A point to keep in mind as we move on would be the striking parallels in the development of Hindu and Christian theology, so that Jesus might be seen as a Christian Krishna or Krishna as a Hindu Jesus.  In both there is the notion of an incarnation, some type of salvation (forgiveness of sins in Christianity, a release from the effects of karma in Hinduism), and unity with God through often highly emotional practices of devotion.

Hinduism was exported to the United States at the turn of the century by Western-educated Indians who downplayed the complexity of Hindu philosophy and religion on their own country.  In particular, the Vedanta Society, which appealed to English expatriates such as Aldous Huxley in the Hollywood area, offered an attractive alternative to the traditional Christian emphasis on sin and salvation. One tradition of Yoga also took hold in the work of the Self-Realization Fellowship, and in the counterculture era of the 1960s the Krishna Society made itself visible throughout the country.

There is certainly much more you may want to read on the Internet about the various teachers and movements that have come to the United States.  Also, with the increasing population of Indian immigrants, there are many more Hindu temples being built, and those in the Los Angeles area might want to visit a very interesting temple in the Malibu hills.

A more tragic note in the current religious scene in India is the increasing rise of a Hindu fundamentalism that has led to violence directed against other religions (Muslims, Sikhs, Christians).

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WHAT IS BUDDHISM?

Our popular Western image of Buddhism, which spread from India throughout Asia, has been shaped by what we know of the Dalai Lama from Tibet as well as movements such as Zen.  Dominant in this image is the notion of ahimsa (nonviolence).

Given the importance of ahimsa with the Jains and Buddhists as well as Hindu leaders such as Gandhi, we might get the impression that India has always emphasized peacefulness and tranquillity.  This was certainly not true in the past and clearly is not true today.  If anything, as we can see from the Bhagavad Gita, divinity operating through human form is more likely to be in the role of the warrior than that of the priest.  (Later we will see a parallel with early Judaism as well as with Islam.)  Perhaps the best way to approach what Buddhism is about is to see it as a powerful reaction to the level of violence and ruthlessness that would often characterize the age in which it appears and is reflected in a document such as the Artha Shastra ("The Treatise on Success"), which reads as an Indian version of Machiavelli.

The legend of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha (literally, "the enlightened one") as the divinely conceived prince led to renounce the wealth and privilege of his rank has a number of points in common with the legend of the Christ (literally, "the anointed one).  There is even the forty days of fasting with temptation from an evil force (Satan for Christ, the jealous god Mara for Buddha),  the remembered sermons, and the formation of a group of followers who have the task of spreading the new message.  An immediate difference is the manner in which Buddhist authority centered on individual monasteries while Christianity set up structures more closely parallel to the Roman political order.  Also, apart from those who chose the life of a monk, the ordinary person accepting Buddhism (done simply through the individual recitation of a brief formula and not through any ceremonial acceptance by the group) was not expected to make drastic changes to his lifestyle.  Gautama himself had insisted that his was the "middle way" between extreme asceticism and an anything-goes worldliness.  For those pursuing enlightenment after the model of Gautama himself, various techniques of meditation were developed that did not involve shutting out mental images (as in Yoga) but actually encouraging them (for this, see more about the exercises used in the Theravada tradition and the use of the mandala in Tibet).

The Buddhist monks would clearly come into conflict with those who represented the older Hindu temples.  The most important issue in the tightly stratified village society of India would be the rejection of the caste system, above all the abandonment of any restrictions about dealing with the "untouchables" and a new position accorded women through the founding of monasteries just for them.   It's useful to keep in mind that Gautama came from an ethnic group already outside the more typical Indian structure and only recently assimilated.  Buddhists, then, began as outsiders, and the most successful proselytizing took place with other outsiders, as in the Greek kingdoms that had been set up in northwest India after the death of Alexander the Great.  One of the most famous documents in Buddhist philosophical literature resulted from an early encounter between the sage Nagasena and the Bactrian King Milinda.  The influence was not all one way, however; the first Buddhist art is see in statues of the Buddha clearly modeled after the Greek statues of their gods.

A key Buddhist phrase is "anicca, anatta," translated as "no substance, no soul."  Nagasena developed this with the Greek king by insisting that just as there is no such thing as a chariot apart from all the individual objects involved in its construction, there is no real "Milinda" apart from the different bundles of perception that we can be aware of.  To understand this major point of Buddhist thought, which in some ways is similar to David Hume's approach in British philosophy, think of how ordinarily we objectify things in our minds, so that, for instance, we look at fire as an object rather than a process or event.  To switch our perspective we move from saying "the fire burns" (making the fire a thing) to "there is burning."  In the same way we look within ourselves and go from saying "my mind thinks" to "there is thinking."   We are "happenings" rather than permanent selves.

Another example would be to look at a light bulb that's lit and ask where the light comes from and where it goes.  Think about this, and we realize it is the wrong question, since light is something happening, an event, and not itself a thing.  If we then ask about what is ultimately there in order for the event itself to take place, we come to the idea that there is just energy that changes form.  In some schools of Buddhist metaphysics we would talk about the Buddha nature as this ultimate flow of consciousness.  The school of Vedanta that we saw earlier in Hinduism seems to have incorporated something of this Buddhist approach, especially with the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara.  Shankara also imitated the Buddhists  by establishing the first order of Hindu monks, one that remains active still.

In the early fourth century Constantine sought to unify his hold on the Roman Empire by converting to the new Christian movement and ordering its leaders to meet in order to resolve doctrinal differences.  Almost six centuries earlier this had been the story of Ashoka, who unified India politically and used Buddhism as a basis for establishing a cultural unity that would reinforce his position.  It is against this backdrop that we can better understand the resistance of the older Hindu world and its need to win back the Indian people by offering a more clearly human figure as an object of worship (Krishna, as portrayed in the Bhagavad Gita, which is inserted as an episode into the older war story, the Mahabharata).

The key ideas of Buddhism are the "Four Noble Truths" with their identification of suffering (dukka) as the dominant fact of human existence, desire as the cause of suffering, eliminating desire as the cure, and an eight-step path as the means by which this can be done.  What stands out here is the emphasis on a psychological account as compared with the metaphysical assumptions of Yoga or the Jains.  Instead of seeing ourselves as eternal selves trapped by our human actions (karma) in a cycle of rebirth, Buddhism emphasizes that there is no "real" self at all.  Nirvana, in the earlier statement of Buddhism persisting in the Theravada tradition of Southeast Asia, is the extinction of any apparent self when the very desire to exist  is overcome.

It is perhaps very important to see how Buddhists can approach such a statement.  We tend to react to it as something very negative and pessimistic.  Perhaps a better approach is to ask how many times we would like to go to Disneyland.  Given the notion that we are reborn many times, most of us are probably not yet at the "been there, done that" stage.  There is no pressure to adopt such an outlook.  Those who are ready to follow the path more completely--accepting the life of the monk, let's say--will know it in their hearts, while the rest of us are encouraged simply to move forward through a deeper degree of compassion for others.  At the same time, in many parts of Asia in the past it was completely normal for male teens to spend some time in a monastery without the expectation that this should be their life's vocation.

The simplicity of this vision assumes that reincarnation is not a solution to a problem--the way that Westerners tend to view it--but the problem itself.  Understandably, this would appeal to some individuals burnt out by their consciousness of a tortured existence, but it would hardly be enough of a basis for the kind of thing Buddhism was to become as a world religion.  Quickly enough, in still another parallel with later Christian history, new documents (the sutras) continue to appear that supposedly represent the hidden teaching of the Buddha to his followers that would be made public as time went on.  This is the basis for the Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) tradition that came to dominate most of Asia.  Just as Christianity later on would incorporate older local deities as "saints" (St. Christopher, for instance), Buddhism in its spread would incorporate various deities as Bodhisattvas or expressions of the ultimate reality of  the Buddha-nature in a "heaven" of their own that aim at helping us achieve our salvation.

Just as Christianity is hardly a single coherent tradition but a number of historically linked movements, Buddhism has to be seen as a collection of belief systems.  Unlike Christianity, however, there is most often the vision that no one system has the exclusive claim to be the "true" church (let's note Nichiren Shoshu--the True Church of Nichiren--as the leading exception), and individuals are allowed to move from one path to another as they feel they should.  What does dominate almost all traditions is the value of compassion as the key to how we should treat each other.

Leading expressions of contemporary Buddhism are the Tibetan tradition best known through the Dalai Lama and the Zen movement that a half-century ago provided inspiration to the so-called Beat movement.

In the Los Angeles area there a number of temples and centers that allow a more personal exposure to many different Buddhist traditions.  Also, I would strongly recommend viewing the film Kundun, Martin Scorsese's depiction of the early life of the present Dalai Lama (and you may also want to view Seven Years in Tibet, which has wonderful scenes capturing the life of a Tibetan monastery).  Finally, be sure to check out additional resources on the Internet, including a visit to a virtual temple.

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WHAT WAS RELIGION IN ANCIENT CHINA AND JAPAN?

In discussing religion in ancient China and Japan we add to what we know about Buddhism, which came to China from India in the first century CE and then made its way to Japan five hundred years later.  We also meet the Confucian tradition, Daoism, and Shinto.

An initial difference from what we have seen in India is that the focus in China is not at all on immortality.  Reincarnation was a belief that became strong in India because of the manner in which it reinforced the caste system.  In China there was a long tradition of belief in ghosts and spirits but not really the type of mythology found in the Indo-European cultures.  Religious specialists were less likely to be the meditative gurus we meet in the Upanishads and more likely to be the wild exorcists and healers and soothsayers we find in many tribal cultures, and the concern of the individual in India soliciting a path to enlightenment for the sake of future lifetimes becomes instead a more pragmatic effort to bargain with the supernatural for advantages in this lifetime.  To the north, especially in Korea, this shamanism would continue down to modern times.

It is always unsafe to generalize too much in discussing cultural patterns, since there are always many exceptions to test a rule.  However, in looking at China, pay attention to what might be the importance of having a writing system, such as the Chinese characters, that does not depend on sound but on concepts themselves.  If we cannot speak a particular language, we will not understand words written out in our alphabets, even if we can sound them out correctly.   With Chinese characters we have a picture style of writing that does not depend on sound, so that the same character can be understood regardless of whether the reader's own language is any of the Chinese dialects or even linguistically unrelated Japanese.  For instance, in this section from the website linked above, we see how a boxlike image of a mouth combines with other images for a number of different meanings.

The practical value of this is that, despite the years it takes someone to master the characters, it is possible to get at the writings of someone such as Confucius regardless of any differences between what his words sounded like and how someone would say them today.  In the West we cannot read Plato unless his works have been translated from Greek, and translation involves the risk of misunderstanding.  (Translating from Chinese is going to be even more difficult, though.  Taking a sequence of images and attempting to express them in English means that the translator thinks he really does grasp what the concepts express, and in translating some famous texts, such as the Book of Dao, any two translations might well seem to be from completely different sources.)  What this definitely ensures is a high degree of cultural continuity based on the written word.  It also possibly emphasizes a somewhat different approach to reality itself, but just how this works is clearly going to be quite speculative.

Please note that throughout these lectures I am using the updated way of spelling Chinese words.  In the 1800s a system had been devised in which you had to remember, for instance, that the "t" in a word such as "tao" was sounded as a "d."  The People's Republic of China has since replaced this with what is called Pinyin (and this means there can be political overtones in how a Chinese word is transliterated).

The key to what will happen in China is a document composed after the Shang Dynasty was overthrown, at about the same time that the Aryan invaders were consolidating their hold on India.  It is called The Book of History and it justifies what otherwise would appear to go against appropriate reverence for the ruler.  The dominant concept is that of "the mandate of heaven"--the view that a ruler's authority depends on his virtue or worthiness, and whether he has ceased to be virtuous wouild be known by his people when his regime becomes oppressive.

By the time of Confucius in the sixth century BCE the empire won by the founder of the Zhou Dyanasty, who had defeated the last Shang ruler, was badly fragmented into a number of city states, and many local rulers claimed the right to be recognized as the one legitimate emperor.  Since inheritance in the Chinese family was only to the oldest son, just as in medieval Europe there was an incentive for younger sons to attempt to find their own way by becoming mercenary soldiers.  This encouraged an ambitious and ruthless local ruler to attempt to enforce his claims to empire through warfare, paying off his troops with what could be plundered from a conquered area.   The reaction within Chinese literature, as in many of the poems found in The Book of Odes, was not to glorify war and the warrior (as happened in Greece or in India) but to emphasize its destructiveness.

A key point in the development of Chinese culture was the practice of the extended family all living in the same household.  A young man was expected to bring his bride home, where she might be treated as a servant by her mother-in-law (who had come into the family the same way), and remain there.  The oldest brother in time would succeed his father as head of the household, although with women typically outliving their husbands in practice the veto power in family decisions belonged to the grandmother.  In close quarters this put a special emphasis on emotional restraint and the need to display appropriate deference (children to father, wife to husband, younger brothers to older brothers).  These three relationships were not to be one-sided, however, since the father had an obligation to provide for his children, the husband to care for his wife, and the older brothers to look after the younger ones.   The notion of mutual obligations reached even beyond death, since deceased ancestors were buried closeby and were to be honored through ritual offerings in order to assure their supernatural guidance of the family.

Note how this concept of the family with its ancestors buried at the home puts a special emphasis on continuity in a particular place.   This was one of the cultural values disrespected by American forces in Vietnam that led to the victory of the Viet Cong.

At the group level in towns and villages the link with the past was marked through traditional ritual observances for which civic officials acted in effect as priests.  Since these were often intricate rites, there was a need for a cadre of individuals, known as the ru, who were experts in them and could act as advisors (somewhat along the lines of being a master of ceremonies).  The man known as Kong Fu-zi  (Lord Master Kong) or Confucius began his career in just such a role, but his particular genius was in seeing how being an expert in the literature and history of China as well as in the rituals would qualify someone to act as a reformer.  His goal became that of bringing a local ruler to display the type of virtue that would allow him to gain "the mandate of heaven," not just for his own people but possibly for the entire country.  Central to this would respect for the family relationships and for the key values of ren (a concern for others), yi (a sense of moral obligation), and li (a repect for propriety).

In time this goal of Confucius would be imitated, and the next few centuries could be known both as the Era of the Warring States and the Era of the Thousand Schools as his own followers split into different camps and still other thinkers took different approaches to the problem of bringing an end to chronic warfare.  Ironically, a short-lived empire was achieved through an individual who followed a particularly ruthless approach inspired by one version of the Confucian teaching that stressed the innate "evil" of human nature.  After its fall, the succeeding Han Dynasty established a system in which government appointments depended on passing exams in Confucian literature.

This Chinese system was to stay in place until the revolution early in the twentieth century that ended the empire.  It became the inspiration for Prussia to establish a civil service based on examinations in the late eighteenth century, and eventually this was taken over by many Western countries.

Almost predictably the status of Confucius himself changed so that in time he became virtually a supernatural figure himself (even to having had a virgin birth), and the body of rites he advocated as well as devotional practices respecting his memory came to be seen as what we know as the Confucian religion.  The Confucian scholarship required for political advancement led to the development of what was a new social class (the Mandarins), who saw themselves as expressions of the Confucian ideal of "the superior man."

By 500 CE Japan, in contact with Chinese culture through Korea, had begun the adaptation of the characters for its own writing system, and in the next centuries the standards of Confucian learning became the basis for a new school system.  A millennium later, at the end of the violent Shogun era late in the sixteenth century, the samurai warriors who had lived by the sword now also lived by the pen, and Confucianism provided the standards of bushido, the code of honor.

Confucius himself had shown no interest in supernatural issues, commenting only that he gave priority to questions about human beings over questions about spirits, and he might have been considerably bemused had anyone suggested he would become in effect an object of worship in later centuries.  He certainly had no interest in mysticism or in any practices leading to altered states of consciousness. The effect of this was to leave the door open for a full rival tradition, both in philosophy and in religion.  Later legends would even hold that Confucius had been in contact with the mysterious "Master Old Man" (Lao-zi) who authored the often cryptic sayings that make up the Book of Dao, but he had not really been a very good student.

Daoism as a philosophy might be seen either as the complement of Confucianism or as its antithesis.  Where the Confucian stressed family relationships and the notion of a learned "superior man," the Daoist looked to the individual, above all to the uneducated peasant in touch with the rhythms of nature (the interplay of female yin and male yang).  If virtue in government for a Confucian (for someone such as Meng-zi or Mencius, in particular) would have the ruler be a wise and learned king providing for the education of his people, the Daoist saw it in terms of the largely unseen autocrat who, where his subjects were concerned, was "to keep their bellies full and their minds empty."  Society for the Confucian was something natural and beneficial, but for the Daoist it was something artificial and dangerous.

The contrasts of yang (the masculine, depicted as a white circle and denoting cold and light) and yin (the feminine, depicted as a black square and denoting heat and warmth) might also be used to describe the mutual relationship of Confucianism and Daoism.  One saying is that in prosperity a Chinese is Confucian and in adversity Daoist, and ordinary experience suggests the movement between a time for action and a time for patient retreat.  One of the recurrent images in Daoist thought is that of water, which seems the least resistant of substances yet can also be the force that, as in a flood, destroys everything in its path.

Historically both movements influenced each other.  The I Jing (I Ching, the Book of Changes), a divination manual still used today, even came to be attributed to Confucius, and the general concept of an interacting yang and yin expessed in the I Jing permeates many aspects of Chinese culture.  Most recently the old art of feng shui--the arrangement of a building and its contents in order to express the harmony of elements--has even come to play a large part in American popular culture.

Daoist religion, which kept alive all the vibrant folk beliefs and practices of China, became more institutionalized after the Buddhists arrived in China and inspired the formation of monasteries.   The political role of Daoism varied from being the basis for rebel movements to providing advice in alchemy for emperors dreaming of immortality.
 

One key to Daoist alchemy was a sex magic that relied on the notion that a man's yang was lost in climax.  In Daoist folklore there were vampiric fox women who seduced unwary males to increase their own energy, but the advice of the alchemists was for the male to have nonorgasmic sex  with multiple partners in order to draw on their yin.  This is parallel to the tantric practices appearing in both Hinduism and Buddhism, especially in the northeastern area of India.

An additional point to note on the Book of Dao is the manner in which it came to be read differently once an empire had been reestablished.  The original political advice is disregarded and instead the emphasis is entirely on its metaphysical and mystical aspects.  In this way it resembles Plato's Republic, which was definitely expressing an idealistic program for political reform and yet in the days of the Roman Empire was interpreted stricly as an allegory for the development of the soul.

The somewhat anti-intellectual outlook of the Daoists came to influence one major movement in Buddhism.  This was the tradition that stressed the notion of meditation (dhyana, pronounced as chan in China and later as zen in Japan) as a systematic effort to empty the mind to recover an underlying state of awareness.  A key Daoist notion, the importance of wu-wei (non-action, or no action against nature), also came to permeate a martial arts tradition first associated with the Shaolin Temple, built in the fifth century for the monk Bodhidharma.

In thinking about religion in China and Japan, we need to avoid the familiar Western image of belonging to just a single church or temple. In Japan, for instance, an individual might go to a Shinto temple for a traditional wedding (although it is becoming increasingly fashionable to be married in a Christian ceremony), seek out Buddhist priests for a funeral and at home maintain a Confucian altar.  This "cafeteria religiousness" points out that in Asia, including India, religion is less a matter of what is believed than what is done.  Specific beliefs or dogmas might be argued by the religious specialists--monks, for instance--but for the most part they are not how we would define membership in any one tradition.  It is for this reason that many Asians might also go to Christian services without thinking they need to stop involvement in any non-Christian patterns.
 

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE JEWISH?

Somewhere around 1000 BCE in a desert area to the east of the Mediterranean Sea a tribal king named David managed to conquer the town of Jerusalem and set it up as his capital.  He was filling a power vacuum left by the fall of the Hittite Empire, which had even managed to rule over Egypt as well as the lands between Egypt and what today we know as Turkey.  David did make use of experienced Hittite warriors, even in his elite bodyguard.  While his army was on a campaign away from the capital, he ordered the wife of one of these Hittite warriors to his own bed and later, after she had become pregnant and he risked exposure, he dishonorably set up her husband to be killed.  He then married the woman, who was named Bathsheeba, and despite the loss of the first child, interpreted as a punishment from his god, she gave birth to Solomon, who established the importance of Jerusalem by building a massive temple in which their god mysteriously resided in the Ark of the Covenant.

According to their legends, David and his people were descended from Abraham, who had been promised all the lands in their area by a divinity that had insisted on exclusive worship as his only god.  Abraham's grandson was originally named Jacob, but according to the legends their god had renamed him Israel.   Israel had twelve sons, and their descendants were the twelve tribes of Israel.   These tribes migrated to Egypt, where eventually they were made slaves and lived in an oppressive regime until one of their own, a man named Moses who had been abandoned at birth but found and raised as an Egyptian, claimed a mission from their god to liberate them and return them to what was then known as the land of Canaan.  After years of wandering, constant warfare had paid off and the Israelites had become a kingdom.

Within the next several centuries these legends were compiled into a set of five books that would be known as the Torah and would be seen as the expression of God's contractual relationship to a chosen people.  From the time of Abraham there is the demand for male circumcision as the individual's expression of his part in the contract, and from the time of Moses, who brings down the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai, there are all the ritual restrictions on food (what we still think of as "keeping kosher") and all the rules for how God was to be worshipped, especially by observing the Sabbath.

"God" is not really a name, and the four letters of the name cited in the Torah were never to be pronounced.  Since the Hebrew alphabet only contained consonants we never can be sure even of how it would have been pronounced.  Modern versions are Yahweh and Jehovah, but it is the Hebrew word adonai (lord) that remains in use in Jewish ritual and Ha Shem (literally, "the name") is what often appears otherwise.  Many modern Jews in America try to respect what they see as the original prohibition against pronunciation by simply using "G-d" in writing.

David had united what were several warring tribes, but this union was challenged even in his lifetime, and after Solomon's death there never again would be just one Jewish kingdom.  At one point much of the population of the region was deported to Mesopotamia (the Babylonian captivity) and Solomon's temple (one of the "seven wonders of the ancient world") was destroyed.  Repatriated by the Persians, a new kingdom of Judah was set up in the south and a new temple was built.  Not all who lived in the region of ancient Palestine accepted this Second Temple of Jerusalem: for those living in Samaria only their own temple on Mount Gerizim was the true center of worship, and there would be lasting conflict between Judeans and Samaritans.  In the time of Alexander the Great the stretch of land that was Palestine would again be subjugated by a foreign power, and after the Greeks came the Romans.

Shortly after the end of the first millennium, in the time of Jesus, the area around Jerusalem, in the old kingdom of Judah, was under direct Roman rule and a nominally Jewish king educated as a Roman ruled in the kingdom of Israel to the north.  Aspirations for independence led to repeated uprisings that typically centered on the idea of a new messiah("anointed one") or warrior king who would bring back the glory of King David to Jerusalem.  Finally the Romans opted to destroy the Second Temple and end the importance of the city.  By this time, though, Jewish emigrants had established communities throughout the Roman world, and in the diaspora ("scattering") they successfully established new patterns of worship that centered on ritual reading of the Torah.

Hinduism could be exported and even embrace other ethnic communities, as in Indonesia, without losing its essential qualities.  The importance of the Temple, which could only be in Jerusalem, stands out since Jewish communities anywhere else could not conduct the ritual sacrifices commanded in the Torah.  Also, although only members of the tribe of Levi could function as priests in Jerusalem, elsewhere their role was reduced and services in meeting halls (perhaps the best translation of the Greek word "synagogue") could be led by anyone.  Although commemorating the escape from Egypt in the festival of Passover was important in ancient times, the particular liturgical forms in use today are only from recent centuries, and the emphasis given some holidays, such as Hannukah, are more distinctively American efforts to provide Jewish equivalents to Christian celebrations.  Even the widespread use of the Star of David in Jewish art and architecture dates just from the last few hundred years.

The high period of Jewish culture was in the Middle Ages in those countries under Islamic control.  In Christian Europe there was typically forced segregation and frequent bouts of genocide.  By the turn of the twentieth century a new movement, referred to as Zionism, was promoting a Jewish return to Palestine that included converting the ancient language of Hebrew into a modern spoken language to replace Yiddish (a German dialect used by Ashekenazi Jews in Europe) or Ladino (a Hispanic dialect used by Sephardic Jews in the Mediterreanean countries).  After the Second World War, when more than half of all the world's Jews died in the Shoah or Holocaust, a new state of Israel was proclaimed.  Ironically, the most fervent Orthodox Jews have refused to accept the legitimacy of this government, arguing that only the Messiah can reinstate the political order that would be the fulfillment of the covenant.

Jews differ on what it does mean to be Jewish.  The extremes range from those secular Jews who see themselves as a distinctive ethnic group but have little interest in religion to the extremely Orthodox, who insist that religious purity as well as birth from a Jewish mother are required.  In the United States there are Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform synagogues, and the divisions even among the Orthodox, especially the Hasidim, can often be deep and bitter (one 1982 film worth viewing  to better understand these divisions, if it can be found in a rental store, is The Chosen, based on a novel by Chaim Potok).  In Israel itself, where Orthodox rabbis are dominant, there is a tendency not to accept most American Jews, who are not Orthodox, as truly Jewish, yet that does not keep American Jews from continuing to regard Jerusalem as their sacred city also.

What is of special importance to us in this study is the role of the written word in establishing a tradition.  We have already seen the place of the Vedas as scripture in India, but a key cultural difference is that the Rig Veda is a collection of chants and not at all the supposed record of a people.  If anything, Hinduism tends to downplay any sense of history while in Judaism history is everything.  The Torah presents a picture of God as establishing a special relationship with one man and his descendants and so defines what it is to be Jewish.  By the end of the first millennium a collection of writings (the tanakh) that included not just the Torah but other historical accounts and a number of vivid literary pieces came to be known collectively as "the book" (biblios in the Greek that was in common use in the eastern part of the Roman Empire) or, in Christian parlance, the "old" testament.

During the Roman period the accidental fact that in both Hebew and Greek the letters of the alphabet could also be used as numbers led to a tradition of number magic according to which words that would have the same total when the letters making them up were added as numbers would have some type of mystical connection.  Devout students of the Torah could then attempt to decipher hidden meanings by the judicious use of equivalences on the theory that if God created the world by his word and the Torah is also his word then there must be such linkages.  In the Middle Ages this concept developed into the Kabbalah, which has continued to the present as a distinctive tradition that has had a checkered history in the Jewish world.  (Oddly enough, the notion of "Torah codes" resurfaced in a best-selling book just a few years ago.)

Most generally Jews do not believe in personal immortality (an afterlife with either a heaven or a hell), so that the dealings of God and man must be accomplished in this world and not in some next one.  What matters is fidelity to the covenant, even if it is not the individuals themselves but their descendants who will benefit most from it.  The Torah is the record of this covenant, and the traditional bar mitzvah ceremony in which a thirteen-year old boy is accepted as an adult centers on a presentation of a Torah scroll and the boy chanting from it.  (Conservative and Reform Jews also conduct parallel bat mitzvah ceremonies for girls.)  The importance of the Torah also is seen in the practice of having a tiny scroll inscribed with something from it wrapped inside a container (a mezzuzah) mounted on the doorway to be saluted with a kiss from the fingertips.

Judaism does resemble Hinduism both in being initially a tradition into which one is born and in the importance of ritually correct conduct ahead over any fixed set of dogmas.   For a devout Jew, God cannot be named or described (classically, there was to be no representational art at all in order to further distance the the faithful from those who worshipped idols), and theology in the sense in which it emerges with Buddhism or with Christianity does not exist.  Instead there is the entire literature of the Talmud recording the efforts of learned rabbis from ancient times to define the particulars of Jewish life.  For many observant Jews, especially among the Hasidim, the study of the Talmud is an entire life's work that takes precedence over any other vocation (a point explored by Joshua Hammer in his book Chosen by God).

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HOW SHOULD WE UNDERSTAND CHRISTIANITY?

For most of you in this course, Christianity supplies the familiar concepts by which most of us define what is meant by a religion.  Chances are that at the top of the list of key characteristics would be the importance of a fixed set of beliefs.  However, from your reading up this point you may have noted that outside of Christianity it is not what persons believe but how they act that matters.  In Hinduism, for instance, a worship of the gods is part of how to live, and the ordinary person and a spiritual elite might actually have completely different ideas about what it might mean to say these gods are real.  Confucius in China even seems to have endorsed the idea that there can be a complete separation of belief and practice, and Buddhism for the most part similarly downplays the need to spell out beliefs.  In Judaism as well, the acceptance of God means following the commands of the Torah, not professing any specific set of dogmas.

In a sense we might say that Christianity got off on the wrong foot because of the need to explain who Jesus was in order to justify practices that were equally unacceptable to traditional Jews and to the Roman citizens who were expected to aknowledge the divinity of their emperor.  The most important element of the story of Jesus as presented by his first followers was that, following his execution for subversion, he arose from the dead and then forty days later ascended to heaven.  Almost immediately he was being referred to as the promised messiah--the anointed one (christos, in the Greek that was the common language of the area)--and even more as the literal "son of God."  For any traditional Jew this was blasphemy, since God might send supernatural messengers (angeloi) in human form but would not take such a form himself, and to suggest that Jesus was a different divine person was to seemingly step back from a pure monotheism.  For non-Jews, raised with a mythology of divinely conceived heroes, the idea that a divine person could come from a family of carpenters and then allow his execution as a common criminal made no sense at all.

In attempting to look back at exactly what the early Christians did believe we find a key problem is the impact of Gnosticism in the occupied territories to the east of the Mediterranean.  In a pattern that we find elsewhere, especially in China, various cults offered an opportunity for either literal or symbolic rebellion against an oppressive regime.  A key notion, which cut to the heart of Roman authority, was that the human soul had been trapped in the physical world and could be rescued only by an esoteric teaching coming from the true world beyond this one.  In such a picture Jesus did not really die (one story has him swapping bodies with Simon of Cyrene and then laughing as the Romans crucified his stand-in), and the enlightened are those who completely transcend the physical world.  For most cults this was through a high degree of asceticism, but for some the theory seemed to hold that the truly "pure" could and should engage in otherwise forbidden acts, especially orgiastic sex.

In such an ideologically charged setting the very success of Christianity as a movement almost guaranteed that cult leaders of one type or another would attempt to coopt the story of Jesus for themselves.  By the fourth century, when Constantine was attempting to use Christianity as a basis for consolidating his own authority, an orthodox understanding was arrived at with the Council of Nicaea and rival interpretations were crushed.  On the losing side were the Arians, who had held that Jesus as a man had somehow come to share in divinity so that he was of a like nature (homoiousios) to God the Father but not the same nature (homoousious), with a play between two Greek words that differed by a single letter.  In Egypt, where a severe monasticism had developed as a voluntary emulation of the sacrifices of those martyred by the Romans, at least one group decided to conceal an extensive collection of writings (including the Gospel of Thomas) that might prove unacceptable: these were recovered in the last century at Nag Hammadi and have been an invaluable resource in the effort to reconstruct the different currents of belief in the early Church.

One of the more controversial efforts to trace the historical Jesus in all these accounts has been the Jesus Seminar.  Understandably, any project that does not take the four canonical Gospels as the revealed word of God proves unacceptable to all those who would style themselves fundamentalist or evangelical Christians.  My point in this course is not to endorse either view but to attempt to look at Christianity as it might appear to someone from outside our own culture.

Christianity spread in large part by accommodating its practices to local customs.  The birth of Jesus, for instance, is made to coincide with the celebrations formerly accompanying the winter solstice, and in many areas local divinities were newly venerated as Christian saints (St. Christopher is just one example).  Prayer to the saints conveniently replaced the devotional practices of a pre-Christian past, and the Church gradually came to claim exclusive rights over ceremonies such as weddings.

The theological distinctions that allowed for sometimes violent dissension among the religious specialists did not matter that much to individuals who were as likely as not to be illiterate, but over the centuries there would be individuals who would attempt to reform what they saw as abuses in the Church by insisting that anything not found in the four canonical Gospels was not legitimate.

Buddhism is like Christianity in being a religion spread by missionaries who organized themselves and many of their more devout converts into monasteries.  In both the Buddhist East and the Christian West these monasteries would become wealthy and powerful in their own right, but a key difference is that Christianty, unlike Buddhism, also developed patterns of organization that roughly paralleled political organization in the Roman world.  This meant that there would be bishops who would for practical purposes be no different than the secular rulers with whom they coexisted.  This was especially true for the bishop in Rome (the Pope), who over the centuries periodically claimed authority over any secular ruler.  Buddhist reformers could always establish an independent temple without political problems arising.  Christian reformers became threats to the Church as itself a political structure, and this finally led to crusades, as in Southern France against the Albigensians, as well as to the Inquisition, which could call for the execution of the supposed heretic.

The movement of the seat of power from Italy to the new city of Constantinople in Asia Minor in the fourth century set the stage for increasing tension between the Latin-speaking bishop in Rome and the Greek-speaking bishop in Constantinople.  When the rise of Islam effectively severed contact by sea, these two areas (or patriarchates) became virtually independent.  In the West, in the "Roman Catholic" Church Latin remained the language of worship and the Pope insisted on his spiritual control over the entire Christian world.  In the East there was not just the "Greek Orthodox" Church but several other regional patriarchates that traced their ancestry to the communities founded by the Apostles and maintained patterns of worship in languages such as Aramaic (the language spoken by Jesus) or Coptic.  While some bishops in these areas would be recognized as being in union with Rome, most were seen as "schismatic," meaning that they were not in union with Rome.  Also, the key bishops or (patriarchs) were never able to assert the independence of the church from the control of kings or emperors to the degree this happened in the West.

Other differences would emerge.  In the East an effort to distance Christian art from that of non-Christians, statues were banned and instead there were elaborately painted icons, still a characteristic of the religious art of Eastern Christianity.  Also, Eastern monasticism came to emphasize distinctive types of meditative practices, such as the Jesus Prayer.  In the West with the Benedictine monasteries, where monks were expected to spend hours a day in chanting the Divine Office, liturgical music developed to new splendor with the majestic Gregorian chant.

In the Middle Ages another type of Catholic religious order appeared with the Dominican and Franciscan friaries, which were typically smaller and stressed the mobility of its members.  In the Renaissance era Ignatius Loyola established the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), still another order that broke away even more from the original monastic pattern.  Today there are numerous orders and congregations for both men and women, and the Catholic school system in the United States was made possible because of these groups.  Also, in an ironic twist given the suppression of monasteries in the days of Martin Luther and Henry VIII, today there are both Lutheran and Episcopalian monasteries.

The Reformation is the pivotal event in modern Christian history, since it is from this time in the sixteenth century that we can talk about Protestants and Catholics.  One key notion involved in the split is the role of an official interpretation of the Bible through Church councils (the Catholic view) as opposed to personal guidance by the Holy Spirit (more typically the Protestant view).  Another is the relative role of faith and works, with the Protestant tending to downgrade the significance of the rituals, especially prayer to the saints, that had come to characterize medieval Christianity.  The reform movement itself quickly splintered into a number of distinct churches that differed markedly in their theologies and their practices.

There is an interesting parallel here with what happened in the Buddhist world.  Early on a reform movement known as Theravada (the Doctrine of the Elders) had rejected the sutra literature as well as the devotional practices characterizing the Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) approach.  The difference is that Theravadins, which we might think of as the "protestants" in Buddhism, remained localized in southeast Asia and did not attempt to match the missionary efforts of Mahayana Buddhists. What we are certainly most aware of it is the extensive network of Protestant evangelists worldwide, with lay people rather than ordained ministers most typically the ones involved.

The Reformation led to other key differences in devotional practices.  For Catholics the role of Mary as the mother of God had given her preeminence in the roster of saints, and indeed some of the greatest cathedrals, such as Notre Dame in Paris, were dedicated to her.  All such veneration of the saints was unacceptable to most reformers, and  this so-called "Mariolatry" was often used as one basis for rejecting the authority of Rome.  Also, with the displacement of the Mass as a central ceremony, Protestant churches made the pulpit rather than an altar the most important part of a church, and instead of the older Catholic liturgy worhip patterns emphasized preaching and the singing of hymns.  In the 1900s in the Southern Baptist tradition the role of a choir became even more important with the advent of Gospel music intended to complement highly emotional preaching.  One film I strongly recommend in order to appreciate better the Protestant tradition as it developed in the rural south is Robert Duvall's The Apostle.

In attempting to look at Christianity as a whole, the following points may be the most important.
(1) Christianity depends on a notion of the individual soul being immortal but without the idea of reincarnation found in Hinduism and Buddhism.  After death someone in the state of grace goes to heaven, someone in the state of sin goes to hell.  Therefore, this lifetime can be seen as a time of pilgrimage as individuals ready themselves for their final destination.
(2) All individuals, as the descendants of the disobedient Adam and Eve, are born in a state of "original sin" and so must be redeemed or bought back.  Because of this original sin human nature itself is weakened and requires divine assistance in order to live according to the law of God known first off through the Ten Commandments.
(3) Jesus is seen as the redeemer, who pays for the sins of mankind through his own death on the cross.
(4) Salvation or redemption involves the acceptance of Jesus as the link to God.
Individual Christian communities differ on the exact meaning of these ideas, but most continue to see Christianity as incompatible with other world religions.  Hindus and Buddhists, for instance, are fond of the image of having different paths up the same mountain with the goal being union with whatever we can mean by God.  Christians tend to insist on the importance of a single path, with no second chances.

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WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE MUSLIM?

By the time of Muhammad early in the seventh century, Christianity had survived its internal crises and established its key doctrines in the form they are known today in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.  Central to this teaching were the ideas of the Trinity--that there are three persons in one God--and the Incarnation--that Jesus was one person with both a human and a divine nature.   While this technically preserved Christianity as a monotheist tradition, anyone not well trained in theology might easily find the emphasis on both the Trinity and the Incarnation to be very troubling.  It was clearly unacceptable to Jews, who were unwilling to see the Tanakh supplemented by what the Christians called their "New Testament."  It would also prove unacceptable to the man referred to in the Islamic world simply as the Prophet.

The Qur'an, the collection of 114 Arabic texts in which Muhammad records what he has heard from God while in an ecstatic state, is a document completely unlike what we have met so far in world religious literature.  Unlike the sacred scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism or Christianity, the Qur'an is composed by a single individual over a great number of years.  The sections (suras) are not organized chronologically or thematically but simply from the longest to the shortest, and, unlike the Bible, only the original Arabic text is seen as acceptable for use in public prayer and private devotion.

Muhammad's effort to establish Islam in his own city of Mecca was not initially successful and he was forced to escape to the city of Medina in 622, the year which Muslims came to use as the first in their calendar.  He returned in victory to Mecca eight years later, but died suddenly two years after that.  By this time his teaching had taken hold not just among the Arabs who had worshipped a collection of tribal gods but among those Christians who had been disturbed by the theological rulings that seemed to compromise monotheism.  Islam did revere Jesus as a prophet and also accepted  that his mother had conceived him while a virgin, but in no way would Jesus be regarded as divine.

From the beginning in Islam there was never the distinction between church and state that Jews and Christians had learned to live with in the Roman Empire.  A key reason is that the Qur'an presents God as the only source of authority and so the only lawgiver that a Muslim could obey in good conscience.  A human ruler, such as Muhammad himself in Medina and then those who were his successors, were in a sense God's lieutenants.  Predictably, the political role of anyone not a devout Muslim would be limited, but this did not take the form of cultural exclusion seen in the Christian west in the treatment of Jews.   Because these children of Abraham's second son were still "people of the Book,"  Muslims made no effort to convert them, and in the centuries to come the greatest Jewish writers and thinkers (Maimonides, for instance) were highly respected individuals who worked in freedom in the great Muslim cities.

The internal struggles that divided Islam into the two great factions of Sunnite and Shiite centered on the struggle for power shortly after Muhammad's death.  One group, the Shiites who make up about a tenth of the world's Muslims, followed his son-in-law Ali, killed in battle, and continued to hold that the last of the dozen true successors would still return in the future.  The majority are the Sunnites, who represent the most familiar vision of Islam throughout the world.

Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, did diversify further.  One powerful movement is that of the Sufis, who argued for a mystical vision and also a monastic way of life that shows Indian influence.  One less appreciated aspect of Islam is the fact that so many of those Africans captured and brought as slaves to the Americas were Muslims (a point brought out in the book and TV series "Roots"), and in recent years many African-Americans have worked to redefine their heritage through movements such as the Nation of Islam.

A critical factor in the cultural history of Islam was the appearance of European colonization in India and the various island chains to its east in the last two hundred years and the European control through the Mideast following World War I.  With independence, as in Pakistan or Egypt or Algeria, has come an effort to link nationalism with a Muslim fundamentalism that calls for replacing western-style legal codes with the shariah, the code established through the Qur'an.  In principle this runs contrary to our familiar notions of a separation of church and state and a religious pluralism.  In the United States, where it is predicted that by 2005 there will be more Muslims than Jews in America, it creates a tension for many Muslims who are less sure how to reconcile traditional practices with normal American life.

At this point we should note again that the majority of  Jews in the world live in the United States, and here most have developed traditions (such as the Reform movement) which downplay traditional ethnic differences and are willing, for example, to accept intermarriage.  Also, it is quite possible to be a strictly secular Jew.  Islam, however, is a definite system of beliefs and practices, in many ways far less complicated than what we see in either Judaism (for practices) or Christianity (for beliefs), and it does not make much sense to speak of a secular Muslim.

The Islamic community in the United States is still a minority among the world's Muslims, and the great period of immigration is much more recent than it is for American Jews.  Typically, individual American Muslims have assimilated by ignoring the rules of the Qur'an (which do not just prohibit alcohol but standard business practices that involve interest on loans), but as the communities grow there will predictably be more of a demand to "modernize" rather than face exclusion.

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WHAT ARE THE NEW MOVEMENTS IN THE RELIGIOUS WORLD?

All the major traditions we are considering in this course took their characteristic form in a two-thousand year period, roughly from 1200 BCE to 800 CE.  We have also seen how they could be remade as reformers would appear who typically called for a return to what they thought of as some more fundamental pattern of belief and practice.  Any discussion of new movements today often involves reviewing relatively recent patterns that present themselves as the "true" way things were done in the past.  An example in Judaism would be the Chabad movement, while in Islam there is the Wahabi tradition of Saudi Arabia (also the basis for the Taliban in Afghanistan).

Sometimes there are movements which attempt to combine elements of distinct traditions, and here the best example are the Sikhs of India melding Hindu and Islamic ideals into something new.

Sometimes there are movements in which, as in the origins of Christianity itself, an individual is seen as a new prophet come to take an older tradition to a new level, and good examples are the Baha'i tradition that originated in Persia and the Unification Church of Sun Myung Moon (the "Moonies").  Still another, particularly significant for Americans, is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons, although recently that term is being downplayed in order to focus more strongly on the group as a Christian denomination), based in Salt Lake City in Utah but sending out missionaries worldwide.

Perhaps the most controversial of the new movements has been the Church of Scientology, which had its basis in a unique technique of therapy developed by science-fiction author L. Ron Hubbard.

Finally, there are Wicca and Santería, both of which link their followers with pre-Christian folk practices.
 

Possibly the best way to develop some feeling for all of these movements is to go through the links carefully, especially when the webpage is an authoritative statement from the tradition itself.
 
 
 

I definitely need to thank Dr. Amy Hannon for her contributions to this website.  She reviewed these lectures while they were being prepared and made a number of useful suggestions that have certainly improved them.

last revised April 8, 2002