Skip to main content

Suzuki meets Swedenborg



It is not immediately apparent why D.T. Suzuki, the great scholar of Japanese Buddhism, would translate (and write a book on), the great eighteenth century Swedish scientist and visionary mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg. Though Swedenborg was both a pathbreaking scientist and one of the most original of theological minds (and deeply influential on nineteenth century artistic culture), he is undoubtedly (and unforgivably) obscure. His status as a 'heretic' might make him appeal to Suzuki's questing mind to find affinities between Christianity and Buddhism but (like Meister Eckhart until recently, on whom Suzuki also wrote) it is not one likely to elicit a mainstream cultural or theological response from 'the West'.

However, closer inspection reveals that the affinities are striking and deeply suggestive.

First, even though couched in the language of visitations to heavens and hells, Swedenborg retained his empirical bent. Everything he wrote about was tested on the anvil of his own interior experience. Heaven and Hell are 'inward states' that constitute our world and its potentiality: they describe possibilities of consciousness and the quest for freedom. This is precisely the statues they occupy in Buddhism: real because inward.

Second, in spite of the apparent ethereal nature of 'vision', Swedenborg was strikingly concrete. All that he described was rooted in a recognition that all understanding tended towards deepening our practice of love and compassion, here and now. Zen is expressed in washing the dishes or, as Swedenborg would say, a tendency towards love would be revealed by the care a cobbler repairs the shoes entrusted to him or her.

Third, everything is trending towards unity, the One, in which our liberation is found. The more deeply we are bound in joy to and with one another, losing our self-centredness, the freer we become. Our ego shed, we discover our selving in a binding of love and wisdom at the heart of life.

It is absolutely true that Swedenborg's language is Christian - much of his writing is a revealing of the inner meaning of Scripture - as Suzuki's was of Buddhism - but both are explorers of the empirical nature of our inner lives that are unfolding from a deepening unity and as searching accounts of human frailty and abundance have deep commonalities.

All of this came back to me in reading Wilson Van Dusen's 'The Presence of Other Worlds: the findings of Emanuel Swedenborg' which is a remarkable book in its own right. Written from the perspective of a clinical psychologist and student of Swedenborg, it acts both as an illuminating introduction and a challenging act of thought to consider Swedenborg seriously as a master of the inner life. This, I think, he was.

Simply to consider his foundational insight that we are drawn to the outer states that we most inwardly love is to bring us face to face with the question: what is it that I love? The answer can be humbling if you can get behind your egotistical assumption and quietly sit with the realities revealed in the contours of your daily life. What do I truly value for this, in a radical sense, will determine the unfolding of my fate, one that rests wholly in my hands dependingon how I respond to the divine offer of freedom?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev