The Bhāvas on the Stage

In this paper I don’t want to show what are bhāvas and rasas because my understanding is too unclear to claim for such an explanation. At the same time it doesn’t discourage me to write about them because apparently no understanding of them in our era is clear enough: disagreement among the scholars is too fundamental to be ignored.

Furthermore; there is a more fundamental confusion, not only about Nātyaśāstra but about all textual heritage received by us: in order to understand a text as the author has meant, how isolated should the text be considered and how should the tradition be trusted? In order to find any middle way between these two extremes there is no way than determining conditions, virtues and values of an authorized commentator. In the case of Bharata’s Nātyaśāstra, the confusion is usually embodied in this question: is Abhinavagupta an authorized commentator? We should not forget that although whoever denies the tradition seems a brave rebel, at the same time, if he is successful, he is busy in founding a new tradition which must seem not so pleasant to the further rebels. In spite of that, I deeply have doubt whether any meaningful understanding of a far historical text is possible in absolute absence of some tradition.

The other consideration which I think is very important to understand Bharata’s meaning is to know what the aim of his treatise is. This consideration can be treated in three levels: a) what his aim was while writing or delivering the text; b) what the aim of the sources from which he had taken his materials was; c) what the reporters of his work assumed his aim. As answer to each question I suggest three alternatives: 1) to give an analytic account of whatever business goes on the stage in a drama; 2) to make a terminological framework for art criticism; 3) to give a practical awareness to the artists (poets, directors and actors) to perform better. One may say that a single theoretical attempt can support all these aims. I accept but the manner of presenting that single theory is completely determined by the aim of the text as Aristotle in his Poetics, Tolstoy in What Is Art? and Stanislavski in his An Actor Prepares! differ in manner of presentation. It’s quite meaningful to speak of a theory of art which has manifested in An Actor Prepares! But if somebody reads that as a book on the philosophy of art, he will be in a deep trouble. Therefore, the aim of the text some how determines who to read the text. Even if not now, some time, I should make a decision about the aim of Nātyaśāstra or about the way in which I prefer it to be read. It doesn’t mean I want or I am able to trace its aim. It is satisfactory if I know assuming each alternatively suggested aim for the book, how it should be read. The meaning and classification of bhāvas, I think, directly depends on this consideration.

The first difficulty to understand the meaning of bhāvas is that Bharata has given two classifications of them without trying to make or explain a relationship between these two: one classification consists of sthāyī bhāvas, sañcāri bhāvas and sāttvika bhāvas and the second classification consists of vibhāvas, vyābhicāribhāvas and anubhāvas. Some questions immediately occur to the reader:

- Is the subject of these classifications the same? In other words, is the object which is classified in the first classification is the same as the object classified in the second one?

- What is the method and criterion of classification in each?

As for the first question, application of one word ‘bhāva’ to all classes as the object of both classifications cannot compel us to accept that one category has been classified in two ways. The word bhāva is too common to specify a class and its literal meaning is too loose to be applied to a distinctive characteristic. Nevertheless, Bharata has given an etymologic definition of bhāvas regarding their function bhāvayanti which raises the reasas.

In this paper I don’t want to study the second classification and its elements and criterions, though I now with respect to rasas and rasanispatti which are considered as the most important ideas of Bharata’s theory the second classification is more remarkable. Here I try to explain, with a great degree of uncertainty, how the first classification has been formed. The main thesis of mine is to declare that in this classification the general abilities of actor are classified and the classification is action-oriented. I need a separate opportunity to show that the second classification is around what the spectator receives from the stage while his eyes are fixed on the actor as the center of the drama. That is a character-oriented classification concerning the relationship between the character and his conditional environment i.e. a net of cause-effect factors of sthāyī bhāvas (vibhāvas), the relationship between the character and his own existence as a combination of soul, mind and body (vyābhicāri bhāvas ) and finally the relationship between the character and his body as an instrument for communication (anubhāvas).



Classification of Bhāva as an Item of Sangraha

Probably, Bharata means by Sangraha the subjects which should be spoken in the treatise among which he mentions bhāvas. In one classification he introduces three classes of them: sthāyī bhāvas (including 8 kinds: love, laughter, sorrow, anger, dynamic energy, fear, disgust and wonder ), sañcāri bhāvas (including 33 kinds like physical weakness, anxiety, envy, shame, remembrance and death etc.) and sāttvika bhāvas (including 8 kinds: numbness, sweating, horripilate, faltering voice, trembling, change of color, tears and fainting).

The word sthāyī suggests us to consider a sense of permanence or stability or basis in sthāyī bhāvas. They are said to become rasas which are the central ideas of staging; so they are illustrated as kings among the other bhāvas which serve sthāyī bhāvas as courtiers. They are also said to be of the nature of cittavrttis or modifications of mind. But it deserved to be questioned: modifications of whose mind? As an answer some alternatives can be thought of: the poet’s mind, the director’s mind, the actor’s mind, the spectator’s mind or the character’s mind. The first three are not obliged to express their own mentality on the stage though the stage should be a manifestation of their professional intentions; therefore I rule them out of concern. If I accept that the sthāyī bhāvas belong to the spectator’s mind, then it will be very difficult to distinguish them from rasas. Additionally, it means, for example, it’s possible to have a rasa of sadness while the mentality of the characters is modified by happiness; but it is the nature of comedy in which sadness is raised along with happiness. I believe that sthāyī bhāvas are the assumed most primary mental moods of the characters. I say ‘most primary’ because they cannot be reduced to any more primary feeling. One may say they cannot belong to the character since the character doesn’t exist in fact on the stage; therefore his mentality and consequently its moods don’t exist. Of course they don’t exist! If they existed on the stage as real, they would not be bhāvas. The other bhāvas also don’t exist as real on the stage: they are assumed and they are tried to be shown. They are void of their real existence and consequently of their natural effects ; otherwise the actors should love or hate each other on the scene. The nature of death as a sañcāri bhāva on the stage is not to cease life but only to produce a rasa. Bhāvas are void of their own reality. In the case of poet, director and actor, sthāyī bhāva is the mood which is intended to be assumed of the character by the spectator. In the case of spectator, they are the moods of characters which, regardless the intention of the agents of the stage, are inferred by spectator as artha and tasted by him as rasa.

Professor Barlingay expressed the sañcāri bhāvas as ‘the atomic behavioral patterns’ and sāttvika bhāvas as ‘the organic sensations’. The first interpretation I appreciate but about the second one I prefer to understand sāttvika bhāvas as ‘the physiological reflections to emotional states’. Probably they are sāttvika because unlike the first two they don’t need any medium to be conveyed to the spectator: they are directly perceived while the other bhāvas are inferred; they are self-illuminative.

Some considerations are possible in the case of this threefold classification:

First: the order of arrangement in this classification reflects the degree of temporality. Drama is a temporal art. The element of time cannot be ignored in action which is the medium of drama. In this classification, the duration of presence on the stage is remarked: usually the primary mental moods stay for a long time so that they determine the whole emotional atmosphere of the drama; behavioral patterns stay shorter than the emotional moods and longer than physiological reflections; and the latter should appear for a short time. If this temporal pattern is not followed, the risk of failure increases for the drama. A drama in which the moods change frequently is a case of chaos; lasting physiological reflections are boring and disturbing; when the behavioral patterns stay long, the drama will be monotone and if they appear for an instant, they will not be expressive.

Second: this order is arranged from subtle to concrete: sthāyī bhāvas are mental; they are translated to behaviors (which are media between mind and action) by the means of sañcāri bhāvas and are reacted by apparently involuntary bodily actions. In the same order, the degree of intellect which the spectator needs to cognize them reduces. Does it remind us of Sāmkhya theory of evolution? It did professor Barlingay though not exactly with the same details. Anyway, as in the Sāmkhya system evolution flows from subtlety to concreteness in order to manifest and present the objects for the purusa’s experience, here this order is to manifest sthāyī bhāvas to the spectator . But the most important point in this comparison is that all tattvas present at the same time on the stage: they are not replaced by each other.

Third: the personal skill of acting consists in these three classes of expression. A good actor should be able to convey these items. They are what an actor as his general ability should be able to perform. The director can say to the actor that “now I want you to be sad”, “now I want you to show that you are jealous” or “now I want you to faint”. This classification maintains a sufficient terminology for the technical conversation between the director and the actor by the means of which the director successfully and confidently can direct the actor to manifest his basic abilities which are compulsory to be already attained by the actor to be an actor. Therefore I can say that in this part of the text Bharata addresses the director and the actor. This classification is action-oriented.

Fourth: is this classification a specific feature of drama or it can be applied to the other per-formative arts? If I find another art to which the same classification is applicable then there will be a hope to generalize this classification. Let’s try the thesis in the case of rhapsody. First we should find a counterpart for the actor of drama. Is the rhapsodist the actor? Actor gets void of his own characteristics to take on the characteristics of the character. Is the rhapsodist void of his own characteristics? For example the actor should not be assumed as himself to be allowed to be assumed as Hamlet for a time. Who is the rhapsodist going to be assumed apart from himself? In fact the rhapsodist is the rhapsodist throughout the whole rhapsody: he is a reporter. The actor lends himself to the poet; what a rhapsodist lends to the poet? I think the correct answer is ‘his voice’. His voice is not an interpreter of his mind but of the work of the poet; therefore the actor in rhapsody is not the rhapsodist but his voice. The actor should lose his identity on the stage while the rhapsodist’s identity is safe. The qualities which the rhapsodist’s voice gives to the poem, consists of these items: per-formative themes, intonation patterns, and interjections. Here, I would like to suggest ‘per-formative themes’ to stand for sthāyī bhāvas, ‘intonation patterns’ for sañcāri bhāvas and ‘interjections’ for sāttvika bhāvas. I think I don’t need to justify the first correspondence. As the sañcāri bhāvas are the states according to which the actor should take a particular behavior, intonation is a vocal property of the sentence which is determined by its meaning and grammatical mood. In other words, intonation is the behavior of the voice regarding the various levels of semantic, syntactic and contextual aspects of the phrase. The correspondence between sāttvika bhāva and interjection is more interesting: both of them are supposed to appear involuntarily under the stress of a strong enough emotion. Interjections have no lexicographical definition as sāttvika bhāvas have no behavioral value. Both of them may appear in the case of any nervous state regardless the content or specific nature of that state. You may utter ‘O my God!’ whether you are frightened or surprised or disgusted as you may sweat whether you are frightened or you have fallen in love or in anger: they present the existence of a strong nervous state rather than its nature. Thus, there is a hope for generalizing this classification to all cases of per-formative arts.


The End

Freedom: Sphere and Cube

Always, day and night, I find a strong temptation in myself to claim that Islam, indeed in its cultural feature, is morphologically a Platonic stream. And always, day and night, conservatively I suppress this temptation and try to satisfy myself merely considering the symbologic aspects. For example it seems meaningful to trace the Platonic symbolism of freedom in Islamic architecture which found its universal typical, as is known world-widely in the present, centuries after its early blooming. It’s meaningful because the chained man in the Platonic Cave who had been expected to get redemption through Hellenistic Neo-Platonic liturgy, having sought for his salvation on Jesus’ adequately Platonically interpreted cross, finally became promised by the Muslim missioners to find freedom through the Mohammedan faith which is expected by them to “drop their burden and their yokes which were upon them.” (Koran, 7: 157)

In order to start such a symbologic study I prefer to consider the most primary sense of freedom which is understood as a state of absence of obstacles with regard to an object of which ability of motion is a natural property. Likewise, ‘setting something free’ normally means to remove the obstacles against its expected motion.

If the mind is an entity which is essentially cognitive, its motion is nothing apart from cognition. Objectively, freedom of the mind to move towards an object is expressed by ‘intelligibility’ of the object. The preceding consideration takes a step from freedom as a property of the subject to freedom as a property of the object, just as in the common interpretation of freedom mentioned above, the objective concept of absence of obstacle, undertook the whole expression.

The Pythagorean School granted a potentially absolute freedom to mind while stating that “the elements of numbers are the elements of all entities.” (Metaphysics, A: 5 [986a]) Here, by numbers, they meant ‘Natural Numbers’ which seemed to them the most intelligible concept. Therefore as they meant that every thing is expressible by the means of Natural Numbers to an absolute mind, they granted the absolute freedom to mind. They were happy with their freedom only until they discovered the irrational quantities like the square root of 2 which can be expressed by no finite numerical formula. The explorer of these quantities has been said to have sunk in a shipwreck committed through a conspiracy by the Pythagoreans.

Plato took this fact as a justification to show how the material world which necessarily reflects the orthogonal dimensions of the space produces elements of unintelligibility: such a space consists of right triangles with legs of length 1 of which the hypotenuses are equal to the square root of 2. This hypotenuse is a length which visually can be sensed but rationally cannot be measured by the Natural numbers. It means the dimensional world consists of elements which are sensible but not intelligible. It’s an obstacle for the freedom of mind. (Republic [546c]; Timeaus [22]; also see Copleston’s A History of Philosophy, vol.1, part I, p. 220)


Therefore in the history of western symbology, it’s expectable to find the geometrical figures like square and cross which reflect the dimensionality of the space to symbolize bondage and its consequential suffering. Especially the latter, the cross, has an important place in the Christian iconography. There have been some Christian schools of mysticism taking the Christ on the cross as a metaphor standing for the man’s soul trapped by the material world for which the cross stands.


If square on the plane symbolizes mental bondage, in the space it will be expressed by cube. On the other hand, if there is a geometrical figure symbolizing freedom, it should express no-dimensionality. Such a figure cannot be any thing apart from circle and its spatial expression ‘Sphere’. This consideration led Plato’s Timeaus to suggest the sphere as the most complete figure, to be assumed as the shape of the whole unique universe and the cube as the most solid figure to be assumed as the shape of the innumerable particles of soil. Thus, indirectly he assigned oneness which is a formal property to sphere and plurality which is a material property to cube.

One may think these are nothing but the mere mathematical symbols; but for Plato no symbol is merely a symbol. A symbol is not able to connote an idea unless it makes the idea recollected and it cannot make the idea recollected unless it participates in the idea. For example, if there is any idea of freedom and if something symbolizes that idea, somehow it should be free by itself. The position in the case of mathematical symbols is even graver. Because they are located as media transferring the forms from the Ideal world to the material world, therefore the idea should been seen clearer and stronger in them. It means, if cube and sphere are the proper symbols for bondage and freedom, they should be respectively bonded and free by themselves. This fact was known by the first man who composed a cubic wagon with wheels and invented the first chariot. But the issue deserves more considerations: a footballer kicks the ball. Ball runs easily and it may stop in infinite positions while it maintains its formal balance. Somewhere else, a gambler casts a dice. It stops much earlier than the ball; but it has only six possible positions to sit for maintaining a balance. It means while in the case of sphere there is no formal differentiation, in the case of cube there is. A Platonic conclusion may be like this: the sphere is formally the most stable and materially the freest while the cube is formally variable and materially more solid. The statement which has been issued in the case of sphere shows that the sphere is formally more pure because it’s closer to the description which Plato gives of forms: an invariable idea free from material variation. Plato might allege that if cube formally were as pure as sphere, its definition should be as simple as sphere while its definition is much more synthetic than the definition of sphere. These evidences might seem enough to Plato to acknowledge the sphere and the cube as the proper symbols for freedom and bondage.

Now let’s shift our attention to the Islamic architecture which I think widely -much more widely than I mention in this paper- is influenced by Platonism. The typical structure in the Islamic architecture is a cubic hall placed under a semi-spherical dome.


The Islamic spiritual topography is a bi-dimensional system expecting godliness to come from the above to the below and directing its believers to the above as it is firmly accepted by the orthodox Muslims that their Prophet received his complete knowledge, purity, and prophecy during a journey to the skies.


This prophecy, as I mentioned previously, is believed to have gifted salvation to human being. Even in the daily rituals, a Muslim physically is directed to the above. These rituals usually are performed in the Mosque: a building which normally follows the typical structural pattern of the Islamic architecture.

It’s very important to know that in Islamic spiritual architecture, the interior is much more important than the façade or any other external features. Unlike Indo-Islamic buildings, in the main lands of the Islamic world, the Mosque is usually covered by a tick urban tissue so that a stranger visiting a bazaar suddenly may find himself in front of the entrance of the main Mosque of the city. Therefore, any structural symbolism should be viewed from the interior. Thus, a praying Muslim surrounded by a cubic-planed hall which usually has no view to outside, facing a spherical ceiling seeks for a kind of salvation which is expressed by the Arabic word ‘fath’ (ﻓﺘﺢ) which means ‘opening’ or ‘to remove the block’.


An elaborated explanation of this concept can be found at the beginning of the forty eighth chapter of Koran (48: 1-3). So I think it is meaningful to interpret this structure as a symbol of the path of salvation: a path from dimension to no-dimension; though I need another opportunity to explain philologically how this symbolism has been taken from the historical streams of Platonism.

Art: Inspiration or Knowledge

The Ion is one of the early works by Plato which is considered by the scholars as a Socratic dialogue not presenting the originally Platonic view based zealously on the theory of Forms. This dialogue is the only work by Plato which can be said to be dedicated completely to ‘aesthetics of art’. The typical idea of this work is the ‘divine inspiration’ as the essence of aesthetic production and experience. As it’s an early dialogue, divinity here should not be understood in a purely Platonic sense as can be found for example in Timaeus, but rather in a Socratic sense which is not so different from the popular mythologies believed by the Greek of the time and received a testimony from Socrates in the Apology.

In this paper a summary of this dialogue will be presented. I try only to highlight the lines of demonstration avoiding the dialectical aspects.


1. Rhapsody

Plato in this dialogue took rhapsody as his case-study though several passages assure us that he has taken rhapsody as a representative of all kinds of per-formative arts like dance and musical or dramatic plays; therefore whatever is assigned to the rhapsody in this dialogue, can be applied to all kinds of per-formative art . But I think it will be illuminative if we know what rhapsody meant in the ancient Greece. Rhapsody has derived from the Greek word ‘rhapsodia’ (ραψωδια) which is related to the verb ‘rhapsodein’ (ραψωδειν) which means ‘to stitch’. The Greek writer Pindar (522-443 BC) defines the word as “the singer of stitched verses”. The Ion by itself is the most informative source about the word. According to the dialogue and the other original sources a rhapsodist was a man who professionally recited a selection of an epic in public assemblies. Some times that recitation was accompanied by songs and some interpretations. The rhapsodist usually had a staff in his hand which was used to perform some dramatic acts. Hence, rhapsody can be considered as one of the most primary forms of dramatic performance. There were several poets loved by the rhapsodist to be taken as the source of the act among which Homer and Hesiod were the most famous. Probably, rhapsody was a more active and dramatic version of what now is known as ‘declamation’.

According to Plato it was widely believed that it’s not enough for a rhapsodist to “merely learn the [poet’s] words by rote… and no man can be rhapsodists who dose not understand the meaning of the poet.” Therefore the rhapsody is something in association with both poetic form and poetic content. The question whether content is something to be conveyed or merely an aid for performing the form is not discussed by Plato.

There is a claimed phenomenon insisted throughout the dialogue and taken at several points as the premise of demonstrations: ‘there are some rhapsodists who are able only to perform the epics of a particular poet.’ Ion, the only opponent of Socrates in this dialogue after whom the dialogue has been named, is one of these rhapsodists though he is one of the best performers in this art. The dialogue starts with an attempt to find an explanation for this phenomenon. It’s remarkable that validity of this claim is not challenged in the dialogue.


2. Art is not Based on Knowledge!

Ion would be able to perform the epics of all poets if his art was based on his knowledge and as he is not able, it’s proved that his art is not a manifestation of knowledge. Suppose his art is based on his knowledge. The immediate question is that what the object of that knowledge is. Here, Plato makes a light distinction between the aesthetic form and the content by suggesting two possibilities for the object of this knowledge. If it is the aesthetic form which is known by the rhapsodist, as form according to Plato is a general and universal aspect of the object, any knowledge of the aesthetic forms should be knowledge of the ‘general rules of art’ which can be applied to all epics of all poets equally. Even if some of these poems are not following these general rules (which makes them bad poems), at least the rhapsodist by the means of his professional knowledge should be able to take the part of a critic to state aesthetic judgments showing disadvantages of those poems; while Ion, though being the best rhapsodist is not able to do that. On the other hand, if the object of the rhapsodist’s knowledge is the content or -as Plato prefers- the subject and the theme of the poem, the following difficulties will be faced: a) the poets who have composed on a common theme and subject like love or war should be equally the subject of the rhapsodist’s skill; while in the case of Ion, obviously it is not true and he is skillful to perform only the Homeric verses though those verses some times are of the same subject as the Hesiod’s epics; b) the people who are the most knowledgeable regarding the themes of a poem should be the best rhapsodist for performing that poem; for example, a successful general should be able to perform the verses of Homer which describe the field of battle; while obviously it is not the case; c) likewise a rhapsodist who is able to perform the warlike verses, usually doesn’t know how to fight. Therefore, as neither the aesthetic form nor the subject or theme can be the object of the rhapsodist’s knowledge, his art cannot be based on his knowledge.


3. Inspiration and its Mechanism

If art is not based on knowledge, what is its basis? Plato’s suggestion is ‘inspiration’ or ‘being possessed’ . The rhapsodist is inspired by a particular or some particular poets so that the relationship between the rhapsodist and the poet is not a rational relationship and therefore there is no generality considered in this case. Inspiration, unlike knowledge, is a particular-based relationship. Ion cannot perform the poems by a poet other than Homer, simply because he is possessed by Homer through a kind of inspiration. Plato is so pleased by this suggestion that he likes to apply it to all artistic activities. He forms a chain of successive inspirations: a god (specifically a Muse ) inspires a poet; the poet inspires a rhapsodist and the rhapsodist inspires the auditors. It is a pattern which can be applied to all per-formative arts:

god  composer  performer  appreciator

It is a divine chain which is formed by a god to convey his meaning to the appreciators and the media, the composer and the performer, are used only as the god’s instruments without admitting any dispositional virtue like that which is found in the case of knowledge. In order to explain this fact, Plato proposes an allegory around the magnet stone: “This stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a similar power of attracting other rings; and sometimes you may see a number of pieces of iron and rings suspended from one another so as to form quite a long chain: and all of them derive their power of suspension from the original stone. In like manner the Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration.” A piece of iron is magnetic only as long as it is in a chain which ends to a magnet stone. Likewise, a composer or a performer is able to effect and inspire the others only as long as he is inspired in his own turn by a chain which has been already inspired by a god. In this allegory the magnet stone stands for the inspiring god.

Though there is no direct mention by Plato to the psychological mechanism of inspiration, the clues which he has given enable us to reconstruct the following pattern for its stages:

Absorption  Imagination  Emotion

This pattern equally may be applied to the composer, performer and appreciator; it means these three stages occur to all of them while they are engaged with the artistic performance or production . In fact, the end of inspiration which is to be handed over by the composer to the performer and by the performer to the appreciator is provocation of emotions. This miraculous process assures the appreciator that the massage which is conveyed through art has a divine source but Plato never mentions what the god’s intention of contacting human through art is .

Once in the dialogue, Plato compares the poet and the rhapsodist with a prophet who is possessed by a god to speak on behalf of the god and as a prophet at the time of prophecy should be void of his own mind resigning his soul completely to the god, the stages of inspiration also deserve the artist to be out of his ordinary rationality entering the realm of madness or being ‘mainomenos’ (μαινομενος). Of course, in the presence of a healthy and rational mind, no absorptive imagination is possible .


4. Conclusion: Plato’s Love-Hate Approach to Art

Plato’s approach to art seems controversial. This controversy never disappears in various dialogues in which Plato mentions the status of art and artist in his semi-ideological philosophy. Obviously, according to him, art is not a virtue, because all virtues finally refer to knowledge while art is not based on knowledge. But on other hand, art though not virtuous is divine and consequently holy. Here, controversially holiness and virtue are distinguished. I have doubt this distinction how much can be supported by the other dialogues. If this distinction is authentic and not merely accidental, the distance between holiness and virtuous can show a basic distance between religion on one side and ethics and philosophy on the other side and again it can suggest a distinction between divinity and reason; a distinction between art as a language applied by religion and dialectic as a language applied by reason. This development of Plato seems consistent with the Greek culture in which mythology is the language of religion as well as the material of poetry; while philosophy started existing just as the mind of philosopher wished to make distance from the mythological accounts of human and his world. Art seems to be invalid because it has come out of madness and at the same time too valid because that is delivering a divine message. In the Platonic ontological cosmology gods are standing some where between the inferior world and the Ideal world just as chest which is the place of emotions is placed between belly and head. It can imply the association of gods and emotions .

All these provide a love-hate approach which Plato started from the Ion. This approach most radically appears when he anoints the poet, crowns him and expels him from the Republic.


The End

Al-Biruni’s Neo-Platonic Understanding of Yoga

Platonism is a disease which has no cure. This disease in its advanced stages compels the patient to interpret whatever statement, in the framework and context which have been designed by Neo-Platonism. An illuminative case-study for this disease is Al-Biruni’s translation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali which can be considered the oldest surviving translation of that text in a non-Indian language .

Al-Biruni who was an Iranian Muslim scholar born in 973 CE, destined for a wide range of intellectual activities, spent a few years of his late fifties in north India learning Sanskrit, Indian religions, astrology, calendaring, mathematics and philosophy. Among the books which Al-Biruni wrote on what he had learnt in that journey, only two have remained: first, a long thesis named as “Investigation into What India Has” published in 1958 in Hyderabad; and second, his Arabic translation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali of which -though having been written prior to and quoted in the former- no manuscript was known till 1930 in which the German orientalist, J. W. Hauer introduced its unique manuscript which is preserved in Koprolo Library in Istanbul . This translation also includes some parts of Vyasa’s commentary .

It’s very important to describe the method, the style and the other general features of this translation, but not philosophically. The main philosophical importance of this translation refers to the basic misunderstandings of the translator which the Arabic text reflects. The aim of the present paper is to show how those misunderstandings have been created by the Neo-Platonic background of Al-Biruni. Additionally and more importantly they give us a clue to imagine how Neo-Platonism could adapt a system of Yoga for itself. While historically such an adaptation in some extends appeared in some religious versions of Neo-Platonism like Augustine’s foundation for Christianity or Sufism, the next step will be to compare what these historical attempts give us with purely Neo-Platonic Yoga which hypothetically might be arrived at by the original Platonists.

However, Al-Biruni, not as an exception to the majority of the other Muslim thinkers, was a Neo-Platonist, or in better words, he was unconsciously Neo-Platonist because Plato and the Neo-Platonists were not so known by Muslim philosophers. Instead, it was Aristotle whose name used to echo in the atmosphere of the Islamic Philosophy. Among the Muslim thinkers the most popular Aristotelian text was not his Metaphysics, Physics or Ethics, but a pseudo-Aristotelian text titled as Aristotle’s Theology which in fact, was a translated selection of The Enneads of Plotinus (Πλωτινος), a Hellenistic philosopher of the third century who is known as the founder of Neo-Platonism. Plotinus found real Aristotle as a maintainer for a good terminological set which could serve to systematize Plato’s Timaeus. Thus, we can say that the Muslim philosophers were unconsciously dominated by Neo-Platonism in the name of Aristotle.


Neo-Platonic System

Now, if we want to understand how this Neo-Platonic domination led Al-Biruni to misunderstand Indian Yoga, it’s necessary to have a glance at the Neo-Platonic system.

According to Plotinus, the origin of the world -though not its cause in any Aristotelian sense- is an indivisible absolute existence which is called just as “The One” (το έν). This One, on one hand reflects the concept of Vedantic Brahman and on the other hand shows an inaccessible prototype of the Platonic “Supreme Form”. Since the existence is the same as consciousness which appears actually and ultimately through the phenomenon of contemplation, the One is a contemplative principle but due to its absoluteness, it doesn’t contemplate on any thing apart from itself: the ideal of Samādhi.

Contemplation in itself is productive. It’s not creative but emanative. In this sense, the contemplation of the One produces a Divine Mind, namely “the Intellect” (νους) which is a reduction of the absolute contemplation. As this product is not as perfect as the One, it has to undergo the dichotomy between object and subject which leads to assume the object to have several aspects. So, the Intellect has two objects to consider: itself as a reduction of the One and itself as itself apart from the One.

Since the real nature of the Intellect is a reduction of the One, the former consideration shows its real nature through a sight which the Intellect has on the One. This sight consists of the whole content of the Intellect because the Intellect is noting but a reflection of the One in the One; but as the intellect is not perfect, it cannot consider the One as whole. Instead, it’s consideration on the One, contains the assumed aspects of the One as a hierarchy of ideas which is the same as the famous Platonic hierarchy of Forms. In other words, the Platonic forms are nothing but the content of the “Divine Mind”.

The latter consideration of the Intellect, in its turn, emanates a further principle which is a reduction of the Intellect, namely “the Soul” (ψυχη). This Soul is not even as contemplative as its generator. That’s why it should undo this defect through activity. Looking at the Divine Mind and its content, the Soul aims to restore the oneness of the One which has been lost through emanation. Therefore, the Soul engages with the formless primary Matter (ύλη) in order to imitate the hierarchy of ideas of the Divine Mind in the matter to make it apparently unique. Wherever that one-pointed hierarchy even partially is imitated in matter, there is life. Here, Plotinus satisfies the Aristotelian concept of life.

Thus, the Soul is identical with the platonic “Demiurge” and through its engagement with the absolutely passive matter, comes to plurality and therefore to emanate several individual souls. But even through this plurality the Soul cannot cover the whole Divine Mind in its imitation; therefore, the Soul is obliged to imitate the parts of the Divine Mind, one after another and consequently the element of time comes to the system. That’s why the material Nature (φυση) is continuously changing. Through this engagement, indeterminacy of the matter brings forgetfulness in the individual soul which should be removed by the Platonic recollection. Therefore, every soul has two aspects: a higher fully aware aspect which is in union with the cosmic Soul and a lower semi-aware aspect which has been spread over the matter creating and governing life. In this life, the individual soul tries to see a picture of its real nature intending self-realization. It’s purusārtha.

Now, let’s turn back to Al-Biruni and his misunderstanding. I prefer to explain the main points within five titles:


1. Yoga and Cittavrtti

In a phrase of the translation which stands for exposing the second sutra of the first pāda: “yogah cittavrtti nirodhah”, Al-Biruni says: “That’s to seize whatever spreads from you towards the external objects in case they are not engaged merely with you and to prevent the faculties of soul from attaching whatever apart from you.”

This understanding of cittavrtti is rather ontological than epistemological or psychological. This understanding is very harmonious with the Neo-Platonic concept of soul which spreads itself over the matter in order to create an imitation of the forms. The formal sub-arrangements of the soul according to Aristotle are the faculties of the soul. These faculties flowing towards the object and touching the object and assuming its form bring their potentiality to actuality. Therefore, the soul which is supposed to govern the object will be subordinated by the form of the object. It’s a feature of Neo-Platonic bondage which should be ceased in Yoga as well as any Neo-Platonic spiritual project.



2. Three Gunas

While according to the school of Sāmkhya-Yoga, the main feature of the material world is to be constituted by three gunas which represent the controversial manifestations of the matter, for a Platonist the main feature of the material world is to be ever changing. Al-Biruni’s understanding of the three gunas is more Platonic explaining the flux of the world. He says: “They are originative on one extreme of the Nature and terminative on the other extreme… and the mean between them takes from them whatever is apt for governing and controlling.” However, Al-Biruni’s interpretation of the three guņas reminds us rather of the three marks of reality in Jainism: “utpāda”, “vyaya” and “dhrauvya”.


3. Knowledge and Samādhi

In Al-Biruni’s translation, there is nothing as surprising as his interpretation of Samādhi. That’s on one hand too odd and on the other hand basically Platonic, so that nothing else might be so nicely passed as a sacrifice to Plato.

Vyasa explains two famous sutras of Patanjali as if the aphorist has classified Samadhi under two classes: “Samprajnāta” and “Asamprajnāta”. The former is accompanied by four features: “vitarka” which Vyasa interprets as direct perception of a gross object, “vicāra” which is interpreted as direct perception of a subtle object, “ānanda” which means joy but has been taken by Vyasa as awareness of the very process of cognition, and “asmita” which is ego-awareness. But Asamprajnāta Samādhi is a state void of those features in which only the Samskāras remain.

If Vyasa presented the objects of Samprajnāta Samādhi to Plato, as in Sāmkhya all of them are material, Plato would consider Samprajnāta Samādhi nothing than “opinion” or “doxa” (δοξα); because according to him, our cognition of the material objects is only an uncertain belief. But if Asamprajnāta Samādhi is supposed to be a higher knowledge, according to Plato, it must be identified with “episteme” (επιστημη) which is our knowledge of the rational and universal forms.

At this point, Al-Biruni, undertaking to advocate Plato, gives the following interpretation: “How many are the kinds of conception? … They are of two kinds: one of them is conception of the sensible and material objects and the second is conception of the rational and immaterial objects.”

First of all, Al-Biruni should be questioned how to translate Samādhi as conception. In order to answer to this question, it’s remarkable that as Patanjali has introduced the triad of “Kriyāyoga”, Plotinus suggests a triad as the means of spiritual development, namely “virtue”, “dialectic” and “contemplation”. This contemplation must be identified by Al-Biruni with Samādhi. The Greek word which Plotinus used for contemplation is “theoria” (θεωρια) deriving from the verb “theoro” (θεωρω) which means “I consider formally”; while, here the Arabic word used by Al-Biruni standing for Samādhi, is “taşavvur” (ﺘﺼﻮﱡﺮ) which means “to conceive of a form” deriving from word “şūrat” (ﺼﻮﺮﺓ) which means “form”. Now we can understand how Plotinus has granted permission to Al-Biruni for translating Samādhi as conception.

Furthermore, if Asamprajnāta Samādhi is supposed to be the same as the Platonic episteme and if Samskāras are the only mental content of this state, Samskāras must be understood by Al-Biruni as the recollected universal forms which should occur to a Platonically enlightened soul. But we cannot blame him for this misunderstanding because the excuse for such a thing has been offered by the ninth sutra of the fourth pāda in which Patanjali says: “… smrtti samskārayoh ekarūpatvāt” (recollection and Samskāras are of the same nature).

Now let’s see what’s the role of this epistemological dichotomy in the theory of bondage and liberation?

Patanjali in harmony with Sāmkhya declares that pain finally and helplessly is experienced in the world and the cause of this pain is a conjunction (samyoga) between the Self as the knower and the object of cognition. The latter modifies itself merely in order to be presented to the self because it wants to realize the natures of both parties through this conjunction. It’s an erroneous view because the self is already conscious even without any object. That’s why we can say that the cause of the conjunction is error.

A Neo-Platonist basically cannot agree with this view; at least, because according to Sāmkhya the matter takes modifications because it’s the principle of activity while for a Neo-Platonist, matter is absolutely passive. Additionally a Neo-Platonist like Al-Biruni is expected to interpret this theory only involving some Platonic concepts like uncertainty of sensual cognition of which the object is the unstable material particulars and certainty of rational knowledge of which the object is immaterial universals. That’s why Al-Biruni explains the point as it follows:

“When an aspect of the object of knowledge is unknown, the greed for cognition increases until that aspect becomes known and the greed gets extinguished; because in the state of bondage, the knower without an object of knowledge is a potential knower and will not be actualized unless by means of an object. For this purpose the object will be known and the engagement between the knower and the object is deserved; because the cognition is acquired through sensation. But sensation is not true due to the faults which occur in it. Whatever is not true is not known certainly and whatever lacks certainty, is misrepresented by a further ignorance. In this state the knowledge is like opinion, because the sensible object is not as stable as a rational object. When this point becomes confirmed without any doubt, that engagement will perish and the knower will get rid of the object, getting isolated and detached. It’s the meaning of liberation in which the knower is knower by its essence.”

The difference seems very narrow but we can see how he has avoided the point of disagreement and how he has inserts the Platonic notions.


4. Samāpatti

Coming to the concept of Samāpatti, Patanjali explains some initial stages of traveling from Samprajnāta Samādhi to Asamprajnāta Samādhi: the presentation of a gross object in a clear mind is a mixture of names, concepts and the very object. By purification of memory (smrti pariśuddha) the two former will be omitted and the object, as it is, will be presented. This process should be applied to the subtler objects so that finally it presents the “alinga” or “Prakrti”, the primary matter which is the source of the whole evolution.

Purification of memory, again, reminds Al-Biruni of a familiar Platonic theme: recollection. If there is a journey from Samprajnāta Samādhi to Asamprajnāta Samādhi, as we saw previously, it must be understood by Al-Biruni as a journey of soul from the material word to the realm of universals. But this interpretation basically seems problematic because Patanjali apparently describes a journey from form to matter.

Al-Biruni has rearranged his understanding in four stages which picture a Neo-Platonic spiritual progress. At the first stage the soul in its lower level, is committing its opinions of the material particular objects. This opinion is a mixture of names, conceptual attributes and the accidental differentiae. Of course this triad cannot be exactly the same as Patanjali’s because the very material object which is the third component of Patanjali’s never could be accepted by Plato to be presented in mind, otherwise it would be the very episteme. Instead of that, Al-Biruni borrows the concept of “accidental differentiae” from the greatest disciple of Plotinus, Porphyry (Πορφυριος), whose “introduction” used to be widely studied by Muslim Scholars as a part of Aristotle’s “Organon”. This stage must be identified with “savitarkā samāpatti” .

In the second stage, through recollection, the soul arrives at its higher level on which it looks at the universals by one side and the particulars only as the shadows of the universals by the other side. Al-Biruni explains that: “When it leaves those three towards the essence through which the particulars participate in the universals, the second level is attained.” Now the soul can assign each particular to its respective universals which form its essence. Due to this assignment, “the cognition is not empty of plurality” because under each universal, several particulars are recognized. Al-Biruni must have identified this stage with “nirvitarkā samāpatti” .

In the third stage, when the soul turns its back to the material world and looks at every form in its unity, as Al-Biruni claims, “it comprehends all objects as ‘One’ but manifested diversely due to time.” As we saw previously, the Soul, even on its highest level, has no capacity to cover the whole content of the Divine Mind at the same moment. Therefore, it approaches the subsets of the universals one after another. That’s just like Husserlian bracketing which forms essence. This stage must be identified with “nirvicārā samāpatti” .

In the fourth stage, only when the Soul gets union with the Intellect, it can have “the One” entirely and simultaneously in sight though as a hierarchy of the forms of which the peak is the platonic idea of the One, as Al-Biruni says: “When the existence seems timeless to him, such a person has arrived at the end of the noble fourth level and is capable of being called a ‘şeddiq’ (ﺻﺪﱢﻴﻖ).” This Arabic word deriving from the word “şedq” (ﺻﺪﻖ) which means honesty is standing for “rtambharā” . But this replacement should not be considered so simply because it’s a technical term in all Platonic traditions in the Middle East indicating a person who has arrived at the final spiritual stage and has a direct and infallible access to the ultimate reality. Here, the One which is the object of this state of knowledge must have been identified with “alinga” but this consideration is again problematic because “the One” is very close to Brahman and not by any means the same as “Prakrti” which is meant by “alinga”.

The other difficulty is that Patanjali in sutra 49 of the first pāda, assures us that the object of this stage is particular (viśesa) while the universals are the objects of the platonic episteme. Now, how has Al-Biruni justified his interpretation? Unfortunately this part of the manuscript is so badly damaged that we can get no idea ; though, it’s not so difficult to assume what the justification might be: first we should be aware that a form is a universal only as long as it is considered as some thing which is participated in by several individuals, otherwise a form is a particular idea among the other ideas. It’s the same charge which is cast by Aristotle upon the platonic theory of forms. Further, we should be aware that the Neo-Platonic One as the object of this state of knowledge in no way is a universal but a unique entity which in this term is the most particular existence. Thus, justification is over.

Regarding this stage, Al-Biruni says: “He will be like a crystal in which its entire environment is seen; as if the objects are in that but that is out of them. Likewise, he encompasses his environment so that the knowledge and the object of knowledge are united with him while he is the knower and the reasoning, the subject of reasoning and the object of reasoning will be one.” Surely, it’s a translation of sutra 41 of the same pāda. But Patanjali in this sutra doesn’t mention the union of subject, object and knowledge; instead, he only suggests these three alternatively as the objects of samāpatti. Again it’s a Neo-Platonic tendency leading Al-Biruni to such a misinterpretation: in the fourth stage the Soul as the knower is one with the Intellect which is at the same time the principle of intellection as well as the objects are the universals which are its content. The same theme is repeated by Al-Biruni translating the third sutra of the third pāda on definition of Samādhi: “that’s purification of those acts so that the consideration comes in union with the object of consideration.”

In order to show how Al-Biruni –at least in his three first stages- is influenced by Platonism, it is enough to quote a passage from Plato’s Seventh Letter: “For everything that exists there are three instruments by which the knowledge of it is necessarily imparted; fourth, there is the knowledge itself, and, as fifth, we must count the thing itself which is known and truly exists. The first is the name, the, second the definition, the third, the image, and the fourth the knowledge. If you wish to learn what I mean, take these in the case of one instance, and so understand them in the case of all. A circle is a thing spoken of, and its name is that very word which we have just uttered. The second thing belonging to it is its definition, made up names and verbal forms. For that which has the name "round," "annular," or, "circle," might be defined as that which has the distance from its circumference to its centre everywhere equal. Third, comes that which is drawn and rubbed out again, or turned on a lathe and broken up-none of which things can happen to the circle itself-to which the other things, mentioned have reference; for it is something of a different order from them. Fourth, comes knowledge, intelligence and right opinion about these things. Under this one head we must group everything which has its existence, not in words nor in bodily shapes, but in souls-from which it is dear that it is something different from the nature of the circle itself and from the three things mentioned before. Of these things intelligence comes closest in kinship and likeness to the fifth, and the others are farther distant.” Here, Plato speaks of name, definition, image, knowledge (episteme) and “the thing itself imparted”; while Al-Biruni has mentioned name, conceptual attributes accidental differentiae (all in the first stage), knowledge of universals (in the second stage) and the reality of the object as one (in the third stage). I think the only note which I have to give in order to establish a full correspondence is about the third components of theirs. Platonic “image” stands for Al-Biruni’s “accidental differentiae” because as Plato has explained further, any image of the object reflects some accidental attributes so that it can differentiate itself from the other images of the same objects: “Every circle, of those which are by the act of man drawn or even turned on a lathe, is full of that which is opposite to the fifth thing. For everywhere it has contact with the straight. But the circle itself, we say, has nothing in either smaller or greater, of that which is its opposite.”


5. Sattva, Purusa and Discriminative Knowledge

Discriminative knowledge (vivekakhyāti) is the key to liberation. By the means of this knowledge one should discriminate between Purusa and Buddhi which some times in the Yoga literature is mentioned as Sattva . In the sixth sutra of the second pāda, they are interpreted respectively as “Drk” or the power of consciousness and “Darśana” or the power of perception. Al-Biruni, translating the same sutra, interprets them as “the immaterial reason” and the “embodied reason” . These are again two standard terms in Neo-Platonism which indicate the Soul respectively in its cosmic level and individual level. Therefore he must have identified Purusa with the Soul or Psyche regarding its association with the Intellect and Buddhi with the same Soul regarding its association with matter. But in the other places, for example translating sutra 35 of the third pāda, he expresses them as Self and Heart ; although, in the traditional Indian spiritual anatomy, usually “manas” is located in the heart and not Buddhi. Probably, Al-Biruni has found his permission for such a rendering in the preceding sutra in which contemplation on heart is said to lead to awareness of consciousness (hrdaye cittasamvit) . The Arabic word which he has used here for the soul is “nafs” (ﻨﻔﺲ) which means “self” and is a standard term which is used by Arab Neo-Platonists for Psyche (the Soul) while word Psyche in Greek language, some times means “heart.” According to Muslim Philosophers, heart is the point at which the soul touches the body and gets embodied.

What’s the basic difference between heart and soul (Buddhi and Purusa)? Al-Biruni’s answer, though satisfying the Greeks, in no extend can be in harmony with Sāmkhya-Yoga: “One may think the heart is identical with the soul … but in fact, the soul is knower and the heart is living. This fact is not veiled for him if he has made the heart empty of the world. Then he will know his real essence.” The motive behind this interpretation can be understood only when we remember the relationship between soul and life in the Neo-Platonic view as we explained at the beginning of the present paper.

The same notice should be applied to Al-Biruni’s understanding of the last sutra of the third pāda in which Patanjali claims that when Buddhi and Purusa are equal in purity, there is liberation . Al-Biruni says: “as long as the heart is not purified as the soul is pure so that they are one in attributes, there is no liberation.” In a Neo-Platonic reading, it means liberation is on hand only if the individual soul is in union with the cosmic Soul. It reminds us of the last words of Plotinus: “Strive to give back the Divine in yourselves to the Divine in the All.” This purification of heart is the same thing which Al-Biruni understands of Samādhi.

***

Now, I dare to proclaim that whatever Al-Biruni has done is not a contribution to Yoga but a great contribution to Neo-Platonism. Whether this contribution was conscious or unconscious, whether he deliberately avoided violating Neo-Platonism or he could not simply be free from his philosophical tendencies, I cannot pass any comment. However, he gave me a framework to adapt a yoga system for Neo-Platonism. Regarding the historical role of Neo-Platonism in the Middle East, a place from which I have come, this contribution is too important for me although I am aware that a man in the modern world, just like Aristotle in the classic world, can state that Neo-Platonism is a cure for which there is no disease any longer.



Notes

Is Darśana a Pramāna?

Traditionally, pramāna is a sub class of jñāna while Darśana is a counter class of jñāna. Therefore traditionally, the answer to the titled question is negative. But I think it costs to try the stitches of pramāna on the body of Darśana not in order to show how the latter my put on the former, but in order to critique the figure of Darśana. A motive behind this suggestion is that the pramāna – however it is defined – is the major measure of every Indian epistemological school.

Dr. Indra Chandra Shastri has given a long list of the various interpretations on Darśana in his book, Jain Epistemology . The very wide variety by itself indicates a problematically debated issue. Usually, this case appears historically when a school has inherited a tradition which is difficult to reconcile with the further and more systematical developments of the school.

Vādi Devasūra in his logical treatise has a brief mention to Darśana only in order to distinguish that from avagraha : “apprehension of the thing in its aspect of mere existence”. The commentator expresses this stage of sensation with this impression: “something is”.

Jain thinkers don’t avoid identifying Darśana in principle with the Buddhist idea of nirvikalpa perception, a non-judgmental cognition of which according to the Buddhist the object is the pure individual or svalaksana, though the Jaina are not fond of what the Buddhist assign to nirvikalpa as object. According to them, though Darśana may be non-judgmental , its object is the most general aspect of the object which is existence. The difference refers to the metaphysical gap: for the Buddhist existence is ultimately individual while for the Jaina it is general as well as individual. For the Buddhist this nirvikalpa is the most essential pramāna because it causes the other so-called pramānas, while for the Jaina as the essence of pramāna is to be determinative, a non determinative sensation can have no role in production of a pramāna. Therefore, Darśana cannot be pramāna and pramāna -hood should start from avagraha in which there is a “lesser general aspect” . Dr. Shastri shows how this interpretation is not a generally accepted one, but let’s, for the sake of progression of the argument, limit ourselves to this interpretation. Here, aphorism assumes that existence is the most general characteristic of an object. An example can show how much this statement may raise challenges:
Suppose there is a hierarchy of universals which can be predicated to a subject. When a universal is above another universal, for example ‘animal’ which is above ‘man’, to be a man implies to be an animal. It is the basis of the first figure of syllogism. Now if existence is the supreme universal, then to be a man should implies to exist. In other words, if existence is the supreme universal (or the most general characteristic), the statement ‘man exists’ should be an analytic statement; while obviously it’s not. Aristotle clarifies this point that there is no category above his ten categories. Therefore, we cannot say that by Darśana we apprehend the most general aspect of the object which on account of generality needs to be determined. If the statement ‘X exists’ -as we showed- is a synthetic statement, it’s a determination by itself. Therefore it can be a pramāna .

A Jaina may respond that the statement ‘X exists’ cannot be a determination unless the subject X has been already determined. Therefore the concerned statement cannot be determinative if it is the first statement issued on X. It means if Darśana is supposed to be the result of the first touch with the object it cannot be determinative. It means the statement ‘X exists’ is not an appropriate expression for the Stage of Darśana; because if X absolutely is not determined, the statement seems nonsense. Apparently, if a Jaina wants to be precise in the case of Darśana, instead of the concerned statement, should state merely: “Existence!!!” so that the subject X is ruled out of the statement. But if that is the case, we should ask what links the new precise statement to the object. In other words, how we can claim that the Darśana is ‘the Darśana of the concerned object’? If the Jaina said that the Darśana is ‘the Darśana of the object’ because in its production the object has role, the epistemological status is Darśana is denied because this Jaina’s explanation is only an ontological explanation. It means that if the Jaina wants to insist on denying Darśana as a pramāna, Darśana should be understood as ‘frequent remembrance of existence through sensation’. This sense of Darśana, rather than being assigned to any object will be assigned to time. A funny consequent of this consideration is that if two objects are sensed in the same time, they cannot create two Darśana, otherwise we should accept that two simultaneous sensations are not possible. If that is the case and if a pramāna is insisted on to illuminate a new object, Darśana cannot be a pramāna.

Now, leaving aside the preceding argument, let’s concentrate on the expression which is suggested by the commentator of Vādi Devasūra’s treatise: “something is.” Let’s ask what is meant by ‘something’. Some possibilities are there:

1) ‘Something’ means ‘a being’
2) ‘Something’ means ‘a being apart from the other beings’.
3) ‘Something’ means ‘being in general’.
4) ‘Something’ means ‘a possessor of thing-ness’
5) ‘Something’ has no meaning but it has only reference.

The first and the second possibilities are very close to each other so that in both of them (especially in the second one) particularity of the object is considered while Darśana is not supposed to meet particularity of the object. A Jaina may respond that as particularity and generality according to Jain philosophy are not separable, it’s not possible to meet generality without particularity. If we accept this defense, it entails that a Darśana defined by the means of absolute generality is not possible but I thing it’s a conclusion which a Jaina avoids. Furthermore, although generality and particularity according to Jain philosophy are not separable, they are distinguishable. Their inseparability is an ontological issue while in epistemology we concern distinction.

The third possibility is equal to say: “existence exists”. Now, it is reasonable to ask whether this statement is analytic or synthetic. For almost all medieval philosophers the statement definitely was analytic: existing is the meaning of existence while the modern philosophy has started with Descartes taking the statement as a synthetic statement. If the statement is taken as an analytic one, there is no need to have experience in order to establish that and therefore Darśana is in vain and if the statement is synthetic there is no reference to the concerned object in the statement and the case will refer to the argument which we gave previously.

The fourth possibility can be taken separately providing the meaning of ‘thing-ness’ is not supposed to be the same as existence. It is possible; for example a ‘golden mountain’ can be expressed as a thing whether it exists or not. It means that ‘thing-ness’ is not always the same as existence. But I have doubt whether this sense of thing-ness can be applied to non-substantial categories. For example, is it correct to say the color ‘red’ is a thing? Even I have doubt whether the last doubt of mine is created by a merely linguistic habitual confusion or not. If thing-ness refers only to the substance and if Darśana is going to be interpreted in this way, the object of Darśana can be only the substance. Again I guest this conclusion is not pleasant to the Jaina. Let’s ignore these doubts and suppose that ‘thing-ness’ is applicable to all categories. Therefore, Darśana should be expressed by this phrase: “a possessor of ‘thing-ness’ exists.” Here, two generalities are assigned to the object: ‘thing-ness’ and ‘existence’. Here we don’t deal with a simple generality but with some extents of details. Furthermore, if ‘thing-ness’ is not essentially the same as existence, the statement will be synthetic. The problem is that: any synthetic statement presupposes the existence of its subject. For example a man is a rational animal whether any man exists or not, because it’s an analytic statement but a man has heart only if a man exists, because it’s a synthetic statement. It means, the fourth possibility cannot be a good possibility because it deserves the statement to state what must have been previously supposed stating the statement.

I would like to postpone going through the fifth possibility until I explain my own suggestion.

Any way, I think all these difficulties have appeared because Jain philosophy tries to introduce some thing with all functions of a pramāna not as a pramāna. I say ‘with all functions of a pramāna’ because Darśana is expected by the Jaina to reveal some true information about a certain newly perceived object in the form of ‘subject-predicate’ while they avoid granting the title of pramāna to Darśana.

My suggestion is that, though Darśana cannot be directly a pramāna with respect to the object but it is a pramāna with respect to ‘sensual stimulation’ or if the Jaina prefers more, ‘jīva’s operation’. The object of Darśana, in fact, can be only ‘stimulation’ and its content is as existential as the content of the other pramānas. Additionally, it means, there is no Darśana for a Darśana otherwise it deserves an infinite regress. On the other hand, Darśana is a pramāna which never can be confused with an apramāna. This fact that the object exists, is the matter of a further, though immediate, inference of which the ‘hetu’ is maintained by Darśana. Because here, hetu (stimulation of sensation) cannot be explained unless it is assumed to be ‘object oriented’. Therefore, Darśana doesn’t determine the so-called object (the stimulating object) and doesn’t give a meaning to that object. It only gives a reference to the object which will be determined through inference.

Eschatological Views and the Environmental Ethics

When we are thinking about the influence which the major religious beliefs impose on the normative approach which human has taken towards the nature, usually we consider the mythology of geneses in each religion and we try to trace the historical human attitude to them. But in fact, at least in the Abrahamic religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the eschatological views have the same importance as geneses. In some religions like Islam, the former is even more important than the latter; so that a person not believing in the set of the genesis mythology may be considered a Muslim more easily than a person not believing in the eschatological mythology.

Additionally it means, if we should moderate the religious interpretations in order to correct our attitude to the environmental crises, we should be aware of the role of the eschatological beliefs and try to moderate them or at least to treat the misunderstandings traditionally having been raised by them.

In this paper, after a brief introduction, I will discuss on eschatological parts of four major western religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism (an Iranian belief which is followed by the Indian Parsis and has also some followers in Iran) and the relationship between them and the traditional attitude to the natural environment.

Initially I would like to mention that this analysis as well as the so-called relationship between mythology of geneses and the environmental ethics, is merely hypothetical. In fact the followers of the mentioned religions are influenced by direct religious commandments rather than philosophical understanding of mythology. It’s a very important difference between the religious approaches of Abrahamic traditions and Dharmic traditions.

Another difference between them which is important to be reminded is that although eschatology in the Dharmic religions has rather a philosophic role, in Abrahamic traditions, it maintains the same part in moral discipline as the notion of “Moksa” in Dharmic religions.

Additionally I should clarify one point: although the main scope of this paper is the Abrahamic religions, I shall pay equal attention to the Zoroastrianism which philologically has derived from a Dharmic family. I have two supporting reasons: first, morphologically Zoroastrianism display the same elements of Abrahamic traditions so that according to Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance, we should count that religion among the latter camp; second, geographically this religion, at the time of its flourishing, took location on the boundary between Abrahamic and Dharmic traditions. Therefore it’s natural to concern the mutual influences of them on each other. Even it’s widely believed by some secular scholars that the idea of eschatology is borrowed by Abrahamic nations from Zoroastrianism around the sixth century BC.


1. Introduction: How eschatological view is important with this respect

In the Encyclopedia of Wikipedia, the term eschatology is defined as follows: “Eschatology (from the Greek, Eschatos meaning "last" + -logy) is a part of theology and philosophy concerned with the final events in the history of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humanity, commonly referred to as the end of the world.”

Since it is a part of theology, as the other parts of theology, it reveals the divine attributes. In this case these attributes will be revealed through God’s plan and role in a universal event which is the End of the World.

In order to analyze the relationship between these attributes and the religious approaches to the nature, two points should be remarked on:

a) God as the source of wisdom: unlike Greek, Egyptian and Hindu-Puranic gods, God in the Abrahamic religions is perfect. As an aspect of this perfection, He is omniscient. Again Abrahamic God, like Greek, Egyptian and Hindu-Puranic gods and unlike Vedantic Brahman and Neo-Platonic “One”, is a self- consciously active God: He is willfully omnipotent. It is an old argument in the Abrahamic religions which nowadays is known rather through a Cartesian demonstration that a perfect willing omnipotent omniscient entity should be good-willing. In this point the divine wisdom comes to the scene. Wisdom on one hand is associated with the beginning and on the other hand with the end. At this point this religious concept shows similarity to the Aristotelian teleology. In fact wisdom is a road which leads the divine good-will from the beginnings to the ends.

Since the Abrahamic traditions have been further influenced widely by the Neo-Platonic tendencies of thought (the best examples are given in the case of Philo Alexandrian the founder of the Jewish philosophy and Saint Augustine who is known as the philosophical founder of the Catholic Church), the Abrahamic theologies appearing after the second century CE, gradually tried to reconcile the active Biblical God with the passive Neo-Platonic “One”. In this process, the divine good-will shifted from a wildly variously accidental voluntariness to a rationally constantly essential wisdom. In this system, the divine good-will consists of granting to the divine principles (which representing the Platonic Ideas and the divine attributes at the same time, form the origin of all entities and maintain the passive aspect of divinity) whatever they deserve temporally (this temporal deserved grant, maintaining the active aspect of divinity, represents the Aristotelian End which is in principle prior to all other beginnings.) As if, the end is nothing but the unfolded beginning. Naturally the end of the world is the moment on which the divine good-will will manifest the ultimate state which is deserved essentially by the nature. Here we can see how the eschatological views can either support or challenge the concept of intrinsic value of the nature which is a crucial point in Deep Ecology. In other words, in Abrahamic traditions, whatever god finally plans for the nature is nothing but the manifestation of the intrinsic value of the nature. This point is of course of an ontological nature rather than an ethical point of view as Ecosophism insists on its own metaphysical nature rather than ethical. Thus, the eschatological view of each religion reveals its attitude towards the intrinsic value of the nature even possibly having been denied.

b) God as the source of morality: Basically we can divide the theistic traditions into two camps: 1) ethics-oriented traditions; 2) nature-oriented traditions. Although it’s not possible to make a sharp distinction between these two class and always we can find some elements of both sects in every tradition, the main criteria is the answer to this question: are the divine characters, at least as whole, representing or supporting or stating a consistent set of ethical principles or not? As a pair of classic examples, the ancient Greek Pantheon’s answer to this question is negative therefore they belong to the second camp while the ancient Egyptian Enneads’ answer is positive and it belongs to the first camp. In the history of Hinduism, the Puranic and further Epical attempts to distinguish the Devas from the Asuras is the final triumph of the ethical orientation over the other one.

It may be said that the Abrahamic traditions belong to the first camp, although in the first stages of the Hebrew theology which are reflected in the first five books of the Old Testament, God seems like a wild furious egoist tribal deity which gradually is going to become civilized as ultimately is shown in Christianity. Even in the former stage, God represents the elements of an individualistic moral system including honesty, loyalty and piety though lacking mercifulness and the other civil norms.

At least in the further stages of Judo-Christian tradition as well as Islam, God’s perfection leads believers to consider God as the source of morality, although a fundamental doubt always has a great role in their view: are the ethical principles reasonable or not? We can find in all Abrahamic traditions some supporters for both possible answers to this question: in Christianity, the positive answer is supported by Tomes while the negative answer is supported by Anselm. In Islam the former is supported by the “Mo`tazeli” sect, while the latter by the “Ash`ari” sect. in the Judaism the book of Job is famous for reflecting this challenge.

According to the former opinion, the ethical principles are accessible through reason considering the intrinsic value of objects and actions, but still, due to imperfection of human reason, we need the perfect wisdom of God to reveal to us surely the objects of moral observation which very God observes in the level of divinity.

According to the latter opinion the normative aspect of religion cannot be derived from any rational process and the objects and the actions are ethically neutral. Consequently, we have to do whatever God orders only for the sake of the obligation which has root in His will. If in the former camp there is any possibility for arriving at normative principles through pure human attempt, in the latter camp, in order to be moral, we completely depends on God, although due to the defects of linguistically instrumental aspects of the divine revelation which is a human defect imposed on this business, again there appear some room for reasoning. This rational process takes place in the field of interpretation.

In both camps; the beginning, manner and goal of morality, whether essentially or accidentally, consist of one notion: Godlikeness; in the former camp, obviously, in the terms of wisdom and good-will, but in the latter one the case is a bit complicated. All Abrahamic religions have a common axiom: God has created man similar to Himself (although I should exclude Zoroastrianism because this religion is not so serious about this belief) According to this axiom the same moral principles which are applicable to God are applicable, at least in principle if not in fact, to man. Therefore, even for the second camp the main moral objective is Godlikeness although according to them the nature of God can be revealed only through His own words. I am not sure how much this concept may be comparable with the meaning of Brahmacarya in Indian philosophy.

However that means, ethically, our behavior to the nature, at least in principle, should follow the same attitude which God has towards the nature and his attitude will got completely manifested at the “end of the world.” Thus, the eschatological view has capacity for being religiously considered as a pattern for the man’s ethical attitude to the nature.





2. Common elements of eschatology in the Abrahamic religions

a) Last judgment: The essential core and purpose of the Abrahamic eschatology is the concept of “Last Judgment” in which every human being will be judged by God (or Jesus in Christianity) and will receive reward or punishment according to his good or bad behavior.

This last judgment usually deserves three events as precondition: “destruction of the natural world”, “final victory of God” and “resurrection of dead.” Among these three, the second one some times is considered the same in nature as the very last judgment although it reveals the hidden dualistic elements of those Abrahamic sects which emphasize on that.

The first event, destruction of the natural world, is the most relevant one among them to our current concern. Here, there is one important question which can determine the direction of our investigation: who or what is the responsible or agent of this predicted destruction?

According to orthodox Christianity, that’s planned by God: “In my vision, when he (an angel of God’s) broke the sixth seal, there was a violent earthquake and the sun went as black as coarse sackcloth; the moon turned red as blood all over, and the stars of the sky fell onto the earth like figs dropping from a fig tree when a high wind shakes it; the sky disappeared like a scroll rolling up and all the mountains and islands were shaken from their places.” (The New Jerusalem Bible; New Testament; Book of Revelation: 6: 12-14) “Then I heard a loud voice from the sanctuary calling to the seven angels, 'Go, and empty the seven bowls of God's anger over the earth.'” (Ibid; 16:1)
The same view is taken in Islamic sources: “When the sun is folded up; When the stars fall, losing their luster; When the mountains vanish; When the she-camels, ten months with young, are left untended; When the wild beasts are herded together When the oceans boil over with a swell; When the souls are sorted out.” (Koran; 81: 1-7)
In opposition, the final destruction of the world, in Zoroastrian view is operated by the Evil Principle of the universe, namely “Angraminu.” In this religion, the natural world is considered as the field, the instrument ant the scope of a fundamental battle between God and the Evil Principle. Originally God has created the nature perfectly and all defect and destructions in the nature has been later caused by the Evil principle. It’s remarkable that this evil influence includes the defects which deserve to be temporally recovered by the regulation of the ecosystem. In their view, as we will see later, there is no circulation of ecosystem in the ideal natural world. Therefore, God and man are supposed to try to save the nature alike and the final destruction of the nature is the last and greatest attempt of the Evil principle in the final battle which will be led to the final victory of God.
The Gnostic Christianity which used to dominate the Christian thought from the first century till the fifth century, although is said to be influenced basically by Zoroastrianism, believes that the creation of the natural world, as a resultant of a mistake, has been done by an ignorant member of the Pantheon and this mistake, fortunately, will be corrected at the end of the world through the complete destruction of the nature. Therefore, the divine will and likewise enlightened people are to destroy the world: God in a macrocosmic level at the end of the world and man in the daily religiously prescribed penance and self mortification which destroy the body as man’s medium with the material nature.
b) Renewal of the creation: In all Abrahamic religions, the process of the Last Judgment which is sometimes considered identical with the Final Victory of God is accompanied with the process of renewal of the creation; as if divine justice may not take place completely in the present nature and there is no choice other than a new creation.
Usually there occur two questions which can be related to our concern: i) Is the new creation material? ii) What is the nature of this new creation and in which way this new creation is more ideal than the present world? Apparently, the Abrahamic religions don’t agree on answering these questions:
i) According to the majority of Muslims, Orthodox Christianity and Zoroastrianism, the new creation is again material. For example it’s written in the New Testament: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now, and there was no longer any sea.” (The New Jerusalem Bible; New Testament; Book of Revelation: 21: 1)
In opposition, according to Gnostic Christianity and a minority of the Shiite Muslims, namely “Shaikhiye”, this new world is absolutely spiritual and not material. Indeed, they cannot maintain any point in the field of our interest, because according to them, the nature has no intrinsic value; the nature is in its essence defective and unjust so that no justice and morality can take form in the nature. According to Gnostics, matter is the same as the Devil and no moral issue may have sense in the material world unless from a Theo-centric or an anthropocentric point of view which can reflect the divine spark in the “darkness of the nature.”
ii) Investigating the nature and the function of this new creation, I would like not to mention the Abrahamic religions which negatively deny the value of nature as are explained above. According to the other sects, the nature and function of this new creation is the most perfect impossible form of matter which grounds the divine justice and peace. Two items are common with this respect:
1) In this new creation there is no provision for any harm to any non-human living being. Human being is excluded from this statement otherwise the divine justice could not occur. Therefore in the ideal world, dynamic circulation of ecosystem will be replaced with some static idealist forms, because all kinds of ecosystem deserve some levels of violence; for example, in Zoroastrianism, the ideal society gradually will go towards vegetarianism and further the living beings will be fed only with music so that this feature described in the Zoroastrian scripture can be realized: “… so that they may restore the world, which will (thenceforth) never grow old and never die, never decaying and never rotting, ever living and ever increasing, and master of its wish, when the dead will rise, when life and immortality will come, and the world will be restored at its wish.” (Zamyadyasht: 11) As another example, even the bloody sacrifice which includes a kind of violence will be nonsense in the Christian new world: “I could not see any temple in the city since the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb were themselves the temple.” (The New Jerusalem Bible; New Testament; Book of Revelation: 21: 22)
2) In order to establish perfect divine justice, the nature should show the most perfect level of unity with human being. A common analysis of possibility of injustice in the present world usually arrives at a conclusion mentioning a kind of separation between man and the world as the responsible of injustice and sin, although this separation is only an appearance arisen by the veil of ignorance, otherwise, man should realize that he is from the same origin as the nature and one entity (God) is currently manifesting in both man and nature. This entity has two aspects: freedom and obligation. The former is manifested in human and the latter in the nature, but as they are to aspects of one entity and they are ultimately one, they mutually respond and reflect each other. This reflection is hidden in the present world while in the ideal world they respond to each other obviously. It means the ideal nature will function with the respect to every body according to his dispositional characteristics consisting of his virtues and vices. That will be the ultimate manifestation of unity of man and the nature and will provide an undefeatable kind of justice. So, the nature of the ideal world (which as I mentioned, currently is the hidden nature of the present world) is the same as the moral character of the man. I thing the best indication of this picture may be found in a phrase of the Koran: “When the earth is shaken to her (utmost) convulsion, and the earth throws up her burdens (from within), and man cries (distressed): 'What is the matter with her?' On that Day will she declare her tidings; for that thy Lord will have given her inspiration. On that Day will men proceed in companies sorted out, to be shown the deeds that they (had done). Then shall anyone who has done an atom's weight of good, see it! And anyone who has done an atom's weight of evil, shall see it.” (Koran: 99: 1-8)
I would like to express the function of this transcended world as “the manifestation of the moral nature of creation.” Now we are able to build the framework of “Environmental Ethics” on the basis of the “moral nature of the environment.”
This fact that the nature in its essence is the same as the moral character of the man has got some proof in the religious historicity of the Abrahamic traditions while we see how the sins having be committed by the man, have resulted in the natural disasters like Noah’s flood, a story which is believed by all Abrahamic traditions.
A most indicative example is a story which is well-believed in Islamic historicity and I think this story has roots in Judo-Christian tradition. The Muslim historians of literature, searching for the origin of the poetry, claim the first poetic piece was issued by Adam, the first man, when his son, Cain, had killed the other son of Adam, Abel (that was the first sin done on the earth.) It’s told that he used to mourn reciting this verse:
“The lands have changed along with whatever is on them;
“And the face of the earth is dusty and ugly.”
Then they insist that this piece was a realistic report rather than a poetic expression, because before that murder the whole water of the world was sweet and all the trees were fruitful. They lost their qualities due to that crime as if the earth was shaken by the first crime on its surface.
c) Redeemer: Usually the renewal of the creation is imagined, either prior or posterior to prevalence of a redeeming figure (“Messiah/Christ” in the Judo-Christian tradition, “Mahdi” in Islam and “Sushiant” in Zoroastrianism.) With respect to this concept, I would like to remark two points: 1) necessity of the redeemer; 2) function of the redeemer:
1) Necessity of the redeemer:
There are several traditional arguments for necessity of prevalence of the redeemer in order to build the ideal world but one of them seems too relevant to our concern: since the nature of the environment is ultimately moral, and the nature and the man mutually influence and reflect each other, a moral uncorrected defect of man, can start a helpless regressive circle in which the nature grounds man’s corruption and man causes the nature’s decay. According to the Christian faith, this starting sin was committed in the Garden of Aden by Adam and Eve. It’s the same sin which Saint Augustine has named the “natural sin.” This first sin has caused the Garden of Aden (which some times is interpreted as a manifested stage of the original nature of the creation), not to be able to stand with the presence of them so that finally they were exiled to a less manifested level of the creation: our present environment. Even it’s interesting to know their sin (eating the forbidden fruit) some times is interpreted as attaining dualistic subject-object-ship cognition of the environment which is a precondition for any moral judgment in opposition to virtuous intuitive action: “Then the snake said to the woman, ‘No! You will not die! God knows in fact that the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good from evil.’” (The New Jerusalem Bible; Old Testament; Genesis: 3: 4, 5) “… when they tasted of the tree, their shame became manifest to them…” (Koran: 7: 22) In this way, “shame” may be understood as moral alienation.
In order to help that mentioned regressive circle, two ways look possible: to damage the whole circle destroying at least one party of this pair; or to add a third element to break the regress. The first way is the same which according to the Bible, God once applied to man through the Great Flood but afterwards, he regretted and swore not to apply it later on: “God smelt the pleasing smell and said to himself, ‘Never again will I curse the earth because of human beings, because their heart contrives evil from their infancy. Never again will I strike down every living thing as I have done. As long as earth endures: seed-time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.’” (The New Jerusalem Bible; Old Testament; Genesis: 8: 21, 22) “God spoke as follows to Noah and his sons: ‘I am now establishing my covenant with you and with your descendants to come, and with every living creature that was with you: birds, cattle and every wild animal with you; everything that came out of the ark, every living thing on earth. And I shall maintain my covenant with you: that never again shall all living things be destroyed by the waters of a flood, nor shall there ever again be a flood to devastate the earth. And this’, God said, ‘is the sign of the covenant which I now make between myself and you and every living creature with you for all ages to come: I now set my bow in the clouds and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I gather the clouds over the earth and the bow appears in the clouds, I shall recall the covenant between myself and you and every living creature, in a word all living things, and never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all living things. When the bow is in the clouds I shall see it and call to mind the eternal covenant between God and every living creature on earth, that is, all living things. That’, God told Noah, ‘is the sign of the covenant I have established between myself and all living things on earth.’” (Ibid; 9: 8-17)
The second way is to add a third element which is known as “redeemer”: “For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (The New Jerusalem Bible; New Testament; John: 3: 16) That’s why in Rabbinic Judaism it’s said that the Messiah will come in an extremely good situation or an extremely bad situation: “Rabbi Johanan also said: The son of David will come only in a generation that is either altogether righteous or altogether wicked” (Talmud Sanhedrin 98a); although the first possibility traditionally is never hoped. In the Shiite Islamic view, the Mahdi will come to fill the world with justice since it has been filled with injustice and injury.
2) Function of the redeemer:
How will the redeemer break that regressive circle? In the early Judaism, the redeemer was supposed to come as a fully dominating ruler to reestablish David’s Kingdom, Solomon’s Temple and its sacrificial rituals. According to them the nature receives the divine bless trough the man, man through the Jews tribes, the Jews through their priests and the priests through the highest priest who is the only one being authorized to pass the main holy sacrifice in the most sacred part of Solomon’s Temple. In fact, this ritual and the rules which the Jews people are ordered to observe on behalf of the whole humanity and secondly of the whole creation, is to fulfill the conditions of a covenant between God and them according to which God has undertaken to give bless to the creation: “So now, if you are really prepared to obey me and keep my covenant, you, out of all peoples, shall be my personal possession, for the whole world is mine. For me you shall be a kingdom of priests, a holy nation.” (The New Jerusalem Bible; Old Testament; Exodus: 19: 5, 6) It means the Messiah’s function, some how though secondarily, is to save the nature. The same role in Shiite Islam is ascribed to the “Hojjat” which usually is identified with the coming redeemer, when they assert that the world cannot sustain even one moment without the spiritual function of the Hojjat.

Here I think it’s not irrelevant if we notice how it is easy to realize the charges like Lynn White’s are unfair. The human domination which is mentioned in the Bible and is the pretext to charge should be understood in two ways: first, a descriptive statement about the ultimate superiority of human abilities over the other species which as is descriptive, cannot have at least a direct indication to any moral norm; and second, a prescriptive statement due to the position of human in the hierarchy of distribution of divine bless. The latter is the moral duty which the Messiah of the early Judaism is to come to fulfill.
In the firs century, while the Jews were waiting for the Messiah to come as a king and defeat the Roman Empire, the Christian alleged that he had already come not to reestablish the kingdom of David in Jerusalem but to establish the Kingdom of God in the hearts of human being, not as a political kingdom but as the Kingdom of the Heaven, not to make the sacrificial smoke ascend but to transcend the man and the nature towards a unity in God, a process which had started by the first coming of the Christ and was supposed to be completed by his second coming at the end of the world.
After this proclaim, the Abrahamic traditions thought of this fact that the renewal of the nature might begin from the inner side of man rather than the outer world. It led them to the ideal unity between man and the nature which should manifest in the Messianic era through the Messianic function.
The common Christian interpretation of the Christ’s function refers to the same fact, while they say the Christ has come to establish “love” as a new covenant instead of the old covenant which was consisting of “Moses’ Low”: an intuitive desire for unity instead of an arguemental judgment based on separation.
d) Spiritual application of eschatology: I spoke of “God-likeness” as a meta-ethical principle of the Abrahamic traditions, and I promised that the plan which God has for the end of the world can reveal the essentially divine attitude to the nature. This consideration can shift that meta-ethical principle to an ethical realm so that a man, who wants to be moral and accordingly God-like, must take the same attitude to the nature as God has according to His own nature and the nature of the nature.
Before continuing this line I would like to mention a spiritual application of these premises which can help this shift to take place more easily in fact. This point would be felt to be important especially if one questions relevance of this argument with the present environment and its ethics: one may say you speak about the ideal world and its properties while we concern the present nature and its to-day crises.
Here, I would like to mention a very popular story which has been related by Rabbinic Judaism:
Rabbi Joshua bin Levi found the Messiah at the entrance of the city and asked him: “When wilt thou come Master?” The Messiah answered: “To-day.” Afterwards, Rabbi Joshua met Elijah (another spiritual figure) and as the Messiah hadn’t come that day the Rabbi complained to him: “He (the Messiah) spoke falsely to me stating that he would come today, but has not.” Elijah answered him: “This is what he said to thee: ‘To-day’, if you would hear his voice.” (See: Talmud Sanhedrin 98a)
This phrase and the like usually are interpreted through two possible contexts. One of them refers to the universal presence of the redeemer which will be manifested whenever his function can be understood by the man. This opinion is taken also by some Shiite Muslim sects and the Muslim Sufism especially when they speak of the “Qotb” (literary: pole.)
The second context refers to another concept which is expressed in Islam by a pair of terms: “universal eschatology” and “personal eschatology”. These two should be study under the light of the concepts of macro-cosmos and micro-cosmos. The former term indicates a chain of events which are supposed to happen at the end of the world as macro-cosmos but the latter means the same state happening in a man as a micro-cosmos. While one has to wait for a certain time to face the universal eschatological events, the personal eschaton may happen every time. It not only may happen but should be realized through spiritual development. In this state, man sees the present nature in union with him and in its manifested essence which corresponds to the moral nature of man. There are so many reports in Islamic spiritual culture about the saints who see the world as if they are in the eschatological era. Two thousand years ago they used to claim that the End is close; it was really close but only to them: the people who could realize the ultimately moral essence of the world through participating in God’s wisdom: “In due course John the Baptist appeared. He proclaimed this message in the desert of Judea: ‘Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is close at hand.’ This was the man spoken of by the prophet Isaiah when he said: ‘a voice of one that cries in the desert: 'Prepare a way for the Lord, make his paths straight.'’” (The New Jerusalem Bible; New Testament; Mathew: 3: 1-3) Those people may be called the awaken men due to an Islamic opinion stating: “the present world is a dream of which the interpretation will be realized in the eschatological ideal world.” In this sense, the environmental dilemma will be simply expressed as follows: “how to avoid bad dreams?”


3. Conclusion

What should we do in order to avoid bad dreams? If you consulate a physician, he will suggest you to change your mental and physiological routines. A Jungian psychologist recommends you to face the dreams and try to realize your sub-consciousness through them and resolve your psychic complexes through this self-realization and then the bad dreams will be curbed automatically. An occultist but, advises you to correct your personality, mentality and action, not only to avoid the bad dreams but also to avoid the bad events which are going to happen to you as the interpretation of those dreams. Any way, your best friend or your spouse, will attempt to relieve you asking you not to mind of them and let them be forgotten. The religious approach to the environmental crises, of course is not like the first one and the last one.

Before continuing this discussion, I would like to have what ever we arrived at in this paper reviewed briefly once more:
1) God is the source of the wisdom through which He grants every thing whatever it deserves in its nature.
2) God is the source of morality, therefore God-likeness is the ultimate goal of morality and however God does or will deal to the nature should be a moral example for the man.
3) God will destroy and renew the nature, partially through a redeemer, at the end of the word in order to establish a complete justice and manifest the ultimate nature of his creation.
4) The following chart reveals the deferent views on some aspects of eschatology:




Cause of World Destruction
Value of World Destruction
The Nature of the Ideal World
Orthodox Sects
Divine Wisdom and Circular Regress
Partially Righteous
Material
Zoroastrianism
Evil Principle
Unrighteous
Material
Gnostic Christianity
Divine Wisdom
Absolutely Righteous
Immaterial

5) In the ideal world there is no harm for any non-human living being.
6) The ecosystem is an unjust but wise divine temporal treatment for some defects of the present world which will disappear in the ideal world.
7) The ultimate nature of the ideal world is moral. It indicates that the ultimate nature of the present world is also moral because the end is whatever is essentially deserved by the beginning. In fact the world is fed with the human morality.
8) Since the man and the nature mutually reflect each other, the moral decay of the man starts a helpless regressive circle in which the man and the nature mutually worsen each other. This circle finally will lead or will be responded by the Final Destruction of the World.
9) In order to break this circle, there needs a Redeemer who should come to the world to transcend the man and the nature. He will unite the man and the nature in God and will reveal their essential union. This process will start from the part of the man.
10) Every body, every time, should try to realize the eschatological era and its properties in himself, as if his relationship with the nature is the same ultimate moral unity. This realization is a result of participation in the divine wisdom and God-likeness.

As a conclusion, what we should do in order to save the nature is to save our own souls. The followers of the Abrahamic religions, according to the previous lines, transcend the problem of environmental ethics: they shift from the field of act-centered ethics to the realm of virtue-cenered ethics. That’s a secondary matter of concern that how many trees you cut or how many animals you slain and for which purpose you do these. It’s shallow to prescribe a list of acts as the moral treatments for the environment: just as shallow as the prescription of the physician for avoiding bad dreams. It’s a secondary concern how to deal directly to the nature while the main cause is our general moral virtues.

If we want to maintain a list of rules in the field of applied ethics concerning the environment, we should consider the natural role of human in the ecosystem otherwise if our rules our so exclusive that they prevent the man as an animal from his part in the ecosystem, it will be as immoral as preventing any other species from its own role. But in which measure the man can involve the ecosystem? Answering simply that “as much as he needs” seems seriously insufficient followed by a new question: “how much he needs?” that’s way the Abrahamic traditions originally think searching for this question in the field of applied ethics is non-sense. Instead we should concern the general virtue of man as a dispositional characteristic. This general virtue, as is expressed in God-likeness, seems to be a kind of intuitive morality rather than any other view which leads us to a moral argument establishing some rules for ethical application.

Additionally, Lynn white is wrong. He is confused between cause and effect and can be challenged by the method of Hume’s skepticism: if the egocentric interpretation of the Christian Genesis appeared at the same time as the egocentric attitude to the nature in the West, we cannot say they have a causal relationship. In fact the general encouraged renaissance egoism caused both the interpretation and the crisis.

Religious view believes that the nature is suffering secondary and accidentally from the violence against her but she is suffering directly, primarily and essentially from general human vicious character, as well as these characters indirectly cause the mentioned violence. We should improve our general moral character and then it will automatically locate us in the harmony with the nature and will control our violent behaviors to her; because the nature is of the same essence as our moral personality. In fact the Abrahamic suggestion for avoiding bad dreams is something between the Jungian’s and the occultist’s.

The original message of Zoroaster emphasizing “Good Mind” as the essential treatment consists of the same view (Gathas; Yasna 29: 1, 6 & 10):

Unto Thee, O Lord, the Soul of Creation cried: "For whom didst Thou create me, and who so fashioned me?Feuds and fury, violence and the insolence of might have oppressed me; None have I to protect me save Thee; Command for me then the blessings of a settled, peaceful life."
… Then, thus spake Ahura Mazda, the Lord of understanding and wisdom:"As there is no righteous spiritual lord or secular chief, So have I, as Creator, made thee (Zarathushtra) the protector and guide,For the welfare of the world and its diligent people:"
… O Ahura Mazda, and O Spirit of Truth and Right! Do Ye grant me and my followers such authority and power through Truth, That with the Good Mind, we may bring the world peace and happiness, Of which, Thou, O Lord, art indeed the first possessor.