Strange Bedfellows: Hinduism and Judaic Mysticism in Comparison

Copyright 1990 by John R. Mabry

If ever there were strange bedfellows in the field of religion, Hinduism and Judaism are two of the strangest. While there is an abundance of material comparing Christianity and Hinduism, I don't believe I've ever encountered an article or a volume devoted to Hindu-Jewish dialog. No doubt this is due to their initial seeming dissimilarity. I cannot think of two more divergent systems, yet, as often happens, the closer we look, the more things begin to look familiar.

In both cases we begin with what Michael H. Barnes calls the "archaic" period of religious development. He describes this as a time when "towns with class structure in a larger world, with great and distant gods demanding worship; grand myths; dreams of idealized earthly life; acceptance (and taboo) morality."1 This describes both cultures well. For both the aboriginal Indian and the Abrahamic Semite, the gods were many, and distant. Fate was manipulated by appealing to the gods sacrificially, and the oldest of scriptures in both traditions are those dealing most especially with the protocol of sacrifice.

At this time, Yaweh was one god among many, perhaps, as Bede Griffiths speculates, Yaweh, like Indra, Zeus and Jupiter, was a thunder-god with an appropriate aspect of wrath which has been carried on in the Abrahamic traditions.2 In any case, it was a long journey for Yaweh in the Israelites' conception from one god among many to the supreme and only god of later Judaism, and nearly as long for Indra to give way to Brahma. For Archaic Hinduism, Indra was the King of the Gods, gods which personified elemental forces and could be "bribed" via sacrifices to intervene on behalf of the patron of the sacrifice. It was common, although Indra was admittedly king, to praise many gods in succession as "the highest god." This is called "henotheism," a label archaic Jews shared, although the Hebrew's version of henotheism differed significantly. Their henotheism described Yaweh as one god among many, but understood that Yaweh was the only one with which the Jews were to have any dealings with. "Yahweh might not be the only god that existed, his followers said, but he was the only one his people should acknowledge as their god. He could take care of all their needs--war, fertility, and anything else." Michael Barnes continues, saying, "This henotheism was only partially successful. For the next 200 years and more, people were still inclined to hedge their bets, catering to all gods who might have some power."3

Eventually in their respective religions, Indra and Yaweh were conceived ultimately as "the king of the Gods" each possessing an intricate tradition of sacrifice and observance, served by an elite class of priests who were the sole mediators between the common person and the divinity. This situation inevitably results in "the creation of a vast abyss, conceived as absolute, between God, the infinite and transcendental Being, and Man, the finite creature. For this reason alone, the rise of institutional religion is more widely removed than any other period from mysticism and all it implies."4 This estrangement, this separation from the "sky god" away "up there" somewhere (still prevalent in many orthodox Abrahamic traditions) creates a fragmented vision of reality at which point the culture is ripe for mysticism and the integration it offers. Gershom G. Scholem writes that "Mysticism does not deny or overlook the abyss; on the contrary, it begins by realizing its existence, but from there it proceeds to a quest for the secret that will close it in, the hidden path that will span it. It strives to piece together the fragments broken by the religious cataclysm, to bring back the old unity which religion has destroyed....The soul's path through the abysmal multiplicity of things to the experience of the Divine Reality, now conceived as the primordial unity of all things, becomes its main preoccupation."5 And so both traditions moved into the "Historic" period of religious development, describes by Barnes as being "highly complex civilizations in which people search for the ultimate single Power or Being that encompasses all else; comprehensive and dogmatic theology; hope for a perfect other-worldly existence."6 While Hinduism's theology moved relatively swiftly into a universalizing mysticism (600 BCE), Judaism took a thousand-year detour into monotheism.

Which is not to say that there was no progress for the Jewish believer, just that it took much time for the mystical ideas common to both traditions to develop for the Jews. The Jewish henotheism was finally broken by the exile into Babylon (300 BCE) where the Jews finally relinquished the notion that gods were territorial. Yaweh went into exile with them, thus it was slavery which convinced the Jews of Yaweh's supremacy. (So prevalent was the notion of divine terratorialism that when a foreigner converted to serving Yaweh, he returned to his own land with two carts-full of Palistinian soil so that Yaweh would not leave him).7 For the next thousand years, between the Maccobean revolt, the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, and the trans-continental diaspora, the Jews had a tough enough time maintaining their cultural integrity to go much beyond their post-exilic synagogal tradition. What mysticism their was took the form of apocalyptic visions in which the heathens and the gentiles "get whats coming to them." When in medieval rabbinicalism, mysticism as an interior process began to develop in earnest, it started out in the same way it did for the Hindus--as a "secret doctrine."

The Svetasvatara Upanishad informs us of "that which is hidden in the secret of the Vedas, even the Mystic Doctrines...."8 The new mysticism claimed as its source the old sacrificial scriptures. Scholem says "instead of the one act of Revelation, there is a constant repetition of this act. This new Revelation...the mystic tries to link up with the sacred texts of the old; hence the new interpretation given to the canonical texts and sacred books of the great religions."9 For the Jew, the primary text of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, informs us that "the Torah has two sides: that which is disclosed and that which is undisclosed, that which is hidden and that which is revealed."10 In such a way, new meanings were read into many of the old scriptures (not just the Torah, exclusively), and in them the Jewish mystic found a manual aiding him in sensory detachment (Ecclesiastes), the heights and depths of spiritual struggle (Psalms), and the union of the individual soul with the Universal Soul (Song of Songs).11

In both traditions, the mysitcal doctrines were held as secrets that could only be approached by the learned few (a Jewish man cannot study Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) until he is thirty). The initiate soon learns that this dual nature of the Scriptures has further-reaching implications. The Hindu discovers the doctrine of Parusha and Prakriti. According to the Svetasvatara Upanishad, Brahma is known in three aspects: The Lord (Parusha), the self, and Nature (Prakriti).12 Parusha is the transcendent aspect of the divine, and Prakriti the embodied manifestation. The Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad describes it thus, "There are, assuredly, two forms of Brahma: the formed and the formless, the mortal and the immortal, the stationary and the moving, the actual and the yon."13 The Zohar echoes this in saying "The process of creation, too, has taken place on two planes...the lower corresponds to the higher; one produced the upper world (of the Sephiroth), the other the nether world (of the visible creation).14 "The Zohar expressly distinguished between two worlds, which both represent God. first a primary world, the most deeply hidden of all, which remains insensible and unintelligible to all but God...and secondly one, joined unto the first, which makes it possible to know God, and of which the Bible says: 'Open ye the gates that I may enter,' the world of attributes."15

The God having attributes is a sticky subject for some in both traditions. The Zohar explicitly states "Woe to the man who should make bold to identify the Lord with any single attribute 16....Neither shape nor form has he and no vessel exists to contain him, nor any means to apprehend him."17 Yet the Zohar also says "If one contemplates the things in mystical meditation, everything is revealed as one,"18 and describes God as "the Soul of the soul." The Chandogya Upanishad says that Brahma is "containing all works, containing all desires, containing all odors, containing all tastes, encompassing this whole world, the unspeaking, the unconcerned--this is the Soul of mine within the heart, this is Brahma,"19 and describes God as "the Real of the real."20 The Hassidic "Song of Unity," sings "Everything is in Thee, and Thou art in everything; Thou fillest everything and dost encompass it."21 And again, from the Upanishads, "Brahma before, Brahma behind, to right and to left. Stretched forth below and above, Brahma, indeed, is this whole world, this widest extent."22 This rides the border between dualism and monism, and both traditions have many proponents on either side. We will not document these tensions, but will acknowledge that they have created great struggles indeed within their traditions.

Also common in their conception of the relationship of the divine to the temporal is the doctrine of emanation. The "sephiroth" mentioned in the paragraph above is one of ten "emanations" of the divine, each embodying some attribute of Yaweh and which pervade and contain the material and spiritual worlds. The Upanishads in two places paint for us a vivid image of this emanation in the spider, who "might come out with his thread as small sparks come forth from the fire, even so from this Soul come forth all vital energies, all worlds, all gods, all beings."23

The source of being in both mystical traditions is also the same: nothing. The Rig Veda says "There was then neither being nor non-being....without breath breathed by its own power That One."24 "It is this mystical 'nothingness,'" says Scholem, "from which all the other stages of God's gradual unfolding in the Sefiroth emanate and which the Kabbalists call the highest Sefirah, or the 'supreme crown' of Divinity."25 (It is interesting to note, as Scholem does, that the Hebrew word for "nothing," "ain," has the same consonants as the word for "I", "ani".26)

The Kabbalist conceived eventually of an indifferent Divinity, which they called "the Root of all Roots," the "Great Reality" or "Indifferent Unity." But most especially, Scholem says, this was called En-Sof. "The latter designation reveals the impersonal character of this aspect of the hidden God from the standpoint of man.... It signifies 'the infinite' as such; not; as has been frequently suggested, 'He who is infinite' but 'That which is infinite.' Kabbalism abandons the personalistic basis of the Biblical conception of God."27 Thus, in both traditions, the conception of God as celestial monarch gave way to the perception of divine immanence of all worlds.

Both traditions play with microcosm/macrocosm and seek to identify humanity in various ways with the Divine. "In the beginning," says the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad, "this world was Soul alone in the form of a Person. Looking around, he saw nothing else than himself. He said first 'I am.' Thence arose the name 'I.'"28 For the Kabbalists, "the world of God the Creator is capable of being visualized under the image of man the created. From this it follows that the limbs of the human body...are nothing but images of a certain spiritual mode of existence which manifests itself in the symbolic figure of Adam Kadmon, the primordial man."29 Scholem continues, saying "God in the most deeply hidden of His manifestations...is called 'He.' God in the complete unfolding of his Being, Grace and Love, in which He becomes capable of being perceived by the 'reason of the heart'...is called 'You.' But God in His supreme manifestation, where the fullness of His Being finds its final expression in the last and all-embracing of His attributes, is called 'I.'"30 The Universal Soul manifested as the Divine Man, the great "I Am" of both traditions is an important development in that humans reciprocate the making of humanity after God's own image. We recognize God in our image, too, and the primal abyss or estrangement is experienced as breached. "The Man has a thousand heads," say the Vedas, "a thousand eyes, a thousand feet. He pervaded the earth on all sides and extended beyond it...It is the Man who is all ths, whatever has been and whatever is to be. He is the ruler of immortality."31 The Svetasvatara Upanishad elaborates, "I know this mighty Person (Parusha)...Only by knowing Him does one pass over death. there is no other path for going there."32

The previous verse referred to "knowing" as having salvific value. Indeed, cognition is a means of salvation in both traditions. For the Jewish mystic, "the rational faculty latent in the mind is actualized in the process of cognition, and this realization of the intellect is the sole guide to immortality...by acquiring it, the Kabbalist thus realizes something of the divine in his own nature.... It is only by penetrating into the mysteries of the Torah, that is to say, through the mystical realization of his cognitive powers, that he acquires it."33 For the Hindu, "the discipline of knowing," or "jnana yoga" is one of the primary paths to salvation. According to the Svetasvatara Upanishad, "By knowing what is therein, Brahma-knowers become merged in Brahma, intent theron, liberated form the womb [rebirth]."34

As far as the conception of exactly what it is that is saved, we also find some parallels. According to the Zohar, there are three distinct spiritual agencies: "Nefesh--which is life--is the lowest of the three."35 This is similar to "life" in the Upanishads, prana, or "breath." "The gods do breathe along with breath," says the Taittiriya Upanishad, "As also men and beasts. For truly, breath is the life of beings, therefore it is called the Life-of-all."36

The second agent is called by the Zohar "Ruah--which is spirit--is a grade higher."37 Now Ruah is the Hebrew word for "breath." The parallels are not perfect analogs, but the same work is obviously going on here. The Zohar's use of ruah is probably most similar to "hamsa" in the Upanishads, perhaps the elemental soul of the Maitri Upanishad (3.2).

Ultimately, we come to "Neshamah--which is the holy soul--is the highest of them all and dominates the others" as the Zohar reads.38 For the Hindu this is the Supreme Brahman/Atman at the heart of all things.

It is the presence of the Atman in all things that connects us. It is by agency of the Atman that it can be said that Brahma is all. This is not a clear conception in the Upanishads. Different writers seem to have divergent opinions, but it is this view which makes the most sense (at least to this writer). Ground-breaking Kabbalist (speculated to be the author of the Zohar) Moses de Leon has written, "Everything is linked with everything else down to the lowest ring on the chain, and the true essence of God is above as well as below, in the heavens and on the earth, and nothing exists outside Him... When God opened the Torah to Israel, He opened the seven heavens to them, and they saw that nothing was there in reality but His Glory...God's essence is linked and connected with all worlds, and that all forms of existence are linked and connected with each other, but derived form His existence and essence."39

Eventually this sense of connectedness combined with the prior concept of the duality of God's nature to produce a doctrine for the Kabbalists surprisingly like the left hand path of Tantra. The Zohar says "And they flowed in a straight path through all the spheres, until they cam to that one place which collects them all into a union of male and female, and that one place is called the foundation, for it is the life and breath of all worlds."40 For the Jew, the image of Shiva and Shakti were represented by Yaweh (the masculine, transcendent element of God) and his holy bride, the Shekinah (the feminine, immanent element of God). Of this union in Hinduism, Thomas Hopkins says, "Shakti is present in all things, in the forbidden food and drink and especially in sexual intercourse. Shakti is the Goddess, the eternal female partner. The danger is that men fail to recognize their human partner as the Goddess, and use her to gratify their senses. They should instead worship her, or the Goddess in her, and turn their senses from gratification of selfish desires to an expression of devotion. This...can be done by means of a disciplined ritual."41 The Kabbalists are not quite as formal, for in their estimation, "every true marriage is a symbolical realization of the union of God and the Shekhinah.... The Kabbalists deduced from Genisis IV.1: 'And Adam knew Eve his wife' that 'knowledge' always means the realization of a union, be it that of wisdom (or reason) and intelligence, or that of the King and the Shekhinah. Thus knowledge itself received a sublime erotic quality...and this point is often stressed in Kabbalistic writings."42

Another similarity of these Historic religions is their numinous quality afforded the scriptures of the prior period. The Archaic scriptures of the Jews (the Torah) and of the Hindus (the Vedas) both assumes nearly divine status after each tradition underwent their mystical evolutions. Hopkins said of the Hindus that "Knowledge of the natural world has become secondary to the knowledge of holy speech." The Chandogya Upanishad contains a hymn to the Vedas which describes them as the sweetest of Celestial honey. Worlds are created, destroyed and maintained through the power of words. The Zohar tells a similar tale: "The Torah it was that created the angels and created all the worlds and through Torah all are sustained. The world could not endure the Torah."43 Elsewhere, it reads, "Whoever studies Torah each day has a share in the world to come, and is himself considered a builder of worlds, for through Torah the world was built and completed. Thus, whoever studies Torah, not only completes the world, but sustains it."44 So, in both traditions, we see the emergence of an occult science of verbiage. Soon, the words themselves were being manipulated in order to manipulate various forces of manifest reality and spiritual reality. The Taittiriya Upanishad says, "These are the great combinations. He who knows these combinations, thus expounded, becomes conjoined with offspring, with cattle, with pre-eminence in sacred knowledge, with food, with the heavenly world."45 Powerful indeed! "Hebrew, according to the Kabbalists, reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world...it has a mystical value.... All creation...is...nothing but an expression of His hidden self that begins and ends by giving itself a name, the holy name of God, the perpetual act of creation."46 Scholem elsewhere says "Torah...is the cosmic law of the Universe....Each configuration of letters in it, whether it makes sense in human speech or not, symbolizes some aspect of God's creative power which is active in the universe."47 So serious were they, that one ancient Kabbalist, the prophetic Abufalia, said, "One has to be most careful not to move a consonant or vowel from its position, for if he errs in reading the letter commanding a certain member, that member may be torn away and may change its place or alter its nature immediately and be transformed into a different shape so that in consequence that person may become a cripple."48

Perhaps the most startling revelation of this study to someone thinking they are familiar with the Abrihamic faiths is the discovery of the Jewish Kabbalistic doctrine of reincarnation. "He...who has not understanding," says the Kata Upanishad, "who is unmindful and ever impure, reaches not the goal, but goes on to reincarnation. He, however, who has understanding, who is mindful and ever pure, reaches the goal from which he is born no more."49 This is standard Hindu stuff, but what are we to make of the inexplicable appearance of such a doctrine in Judaism? The Jewish theory of Gilgul (revolving) appears first in the twelfth century Book Bahir. According to Charles Ponce, "all souls must undergo transmigration and that the souls of men revolve like a stone which is thrown from a sling, so many turns before the final release.... Because all souls were originally contained in Adam, or actually made up the soul of Adam, the objective of each individual soul was to win its place back in the soul of Adam, and by so doing restore him to his original form before the Fall."50

For both traditions, great import is placed upon scholarliness (especially for the rabbinic and priestly folk), the attendance to the written word and chanting. The spiritual process itself has some similarities. The goal of the Hassidic Jew, according to the eighteenth century Hassidic philosopher, Maggid of Mezerich, is this: "A man should actually detach his ego from his body until he has passed through all the worlds and become one with God, till he disappears entirely out of the bodiless world." The Prasna Upanishad describes this more poetically, saying "As these flowing rivers that tend toward the ocean, on reaching the ocean, disappear, their name and form are destroyed, and it is called simply 'the ocean.'"51 Techniques for accomplishing this are likewise similar. To quote Scholem again, "[Abulifa's] teachings represent but a Judaized version of the...Indian...system known as Yoga. To cite only one instance out of many, an important part in Abulafia's system is played by the technique of breathing.... Abulifia lays down certain rules of body posture, certain corresponding combinations of consonants and vowels, and certain forms of recitation."52

Judaism has not been slack in taking their mysticism forward, either, for they have continued beyond the orthodox system of Hinduism, to mirror developments of the Jains (Ari Luria carefully avoided harming even insects and worms, insisting that these too would evolve through the course fo trasmigrating souls), and the Buddhists (Luria taught that "once the purified, humbled mind had attached itself to its divine source, it was obliged to plunge downward into the descending worlds with renewed strength and withdraw the holy sparks from the husks of matter encasing every being, flower, mineral and demon inhabiting them."53 What a hilarious mental image, black clad Jewish Bhodi-sattvas flying like Superman between the worlds!).

What began as a whim became something of an obsession, the idea that mysticism, in any cultural context is going to eventually develop in nearly identical patterns is frightening to the Abrahamic orthodox. It is, though, another proof of Huxley's Perennial Philosophy, and of our unity as People of Faith, regardless of our religion of origin. These Historic developments are the excepted norms in their respective traditions, Hinduism and Judaism (although most Christians would be loathe to believe it of their mother faith). Perhaps Jewish/Hindu dialog is not such a silly proposition, but an avenue of important investigation as we try to close the gaps between the East and West.

"And thus the substance of the canonical texts,

like that of all other religious values,

is melted down and given another form as

it passes through the fiery stream of the

mystical consciousness. It is hardly surprising

that, hard as the mystic may try to remain

within the confines of his religion, he often

consciously or unconsciously approaches,

or even transgresses, its limits."

--Gershom G. Scholem 54

NOTES

1 Michael H. Barnes, In the Presence of Mystery (Mystic: XXIII Publications, 1984), p. 6.

2 Fr. Bede Griffiths, The Marriage of East and West (Springfield: Templgate Publishers, 1982), p. 106.

3 Barnes, p. 50.

4 Gershom G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1946), p. 7.

5 Ibid.

6 Barnes, p. 6.

7 II Kings, chap. 5.

8 Robert Ernest Hume, trans. The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1877), Svetasvatara Upanishad 5.6, p. 406.

9 Scholem, p. 9.

10 Jerry Winston, trans. Colors from the Zohar (San Francisco: Barah, 1976), p.57.

11 Perle Epstein, Kabbalah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic (Boston: Shambhala, 1978), 11.

12 Thomas J. Hopkins, The Hindu Religious Tradition (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1971), p. 66.

13 Hume, Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 2.3.1, p. 97.

14 Zohar I.240b, quoted by Scholem, p. 222.

15 Scholem, p. 208.

16 Gershom G. Scholem, ed., Zohar, The Book of Splendor (New York: Schocken, 1963), p. 78.

17 Ibid, p. 79.

18 Zohar 1.24a, quoted by Scholem, p. 222.

19 Hume, Chandogya Upanishad 3.14.4, p. 210.

20 Ibid., Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 2.1.20, p. 95.

21 Scholem, p. 108.

22 Hume, Mundaka Upanishad 2.2.11, p. 373.

23 Ibid., Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 2.1.20, p. 95.

24 Ibid., Rig Veda 10.129.1-2, p. 13.

25 Scholem, p. 217.

26 Ibid., p. 218.

27 Ibid., p. 141.

28 Hume, Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad 1.4.1, p. 81.

29 Scholem, p. 215.

30 Ibid., p. 216.

31 Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, trans. The Rig Veda (New York: Penguin, 1982), 10.90.1-7, p. 29.

32 Hume, Svetasvatara Upanishad 3.10, p. 401.

33 Scholem, p. 240-1.

34 Hume, Svetasvatara Upanishad 1.7, p. 395.

35 Winston, p. 43.

36 Hume, Taittiriya Upanishad 3.1, p. 284.

37 Winston, p. 43.

38 Ibid.

39 Scholem, p. 223.

40 Winston, p. 34.

41 Hopkins, p. 129.

42 Scholem, p. 235.

43 Zohar, p. 121.

44 Winston, p. 68.

45 Hume, Taittiriya Upanishad 1.3.4, p. 276.

46 Scholem, p. 43.

47 Ibid., p. 14.

48 Ibid., p. 138.

49 Hume, Katha Upanishad 3.7-8, p. 352.

50 Charles Ponce, Kabbalah (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1973), p.215.

51 Hume, Prasna Upanishad 6.5, p. 389.

52 Scholem, p. 139.

53 Epstein, p. 20.

54 Scholem, p. 9.