[Advaita-l] Sankara and Eckhart - By TMP Mahadevan

[Divya Shivashankar]

Sankara and Eckhart - By TMP Mahadevan

Part 2

What is true of Shankara's doctrine of God is true of Eckhart's also. The
view of both is super-theism and not anti-theism. Even when he mounts up
high on the towers of mysticism, the German. Dominican monk keeps close to
the Christian belief in God. Clinging to God, having intimate communion
with Him, according to Eckhart, is the very meaning of the life of man.
God, here, is conceived as the power of life, as light and life, as truth,
knowledge, essential holiness and justice, rather than as King, Father,
Judge - a person in relation to persons. What Eckhart is not in favour of
is the external view of God. God is not to be looked upon as an "objectum".
To possess God is to live God, or rather "to be lived by God." The meaning
of Eckhart's statement that man must get rid of God is that man must get
rid of the conceived and apprehended God. What man should realize is that
God is the inward power and the health of his spiritual life. In Eckhart's
"talks of Instruction" the following occurs:

"Man should not have merely a God intellectually conceived. For when
thought passes them God (intellectually conceived) also passes. Rather, man
must have an essential God, who is high above the thoughts of men (because
He is inwardly possessed and lived). This God does not pass away unless man
turns from Him of his own free will. Whoever has God thus in his being
conceives Him divinely. For him God shines in all things. In him God has
His eyes open at all times. In him there is a quiet turning from outward
things and a penetrating into the ever-present God."

It is surprising that even for the concept of maayaa there is a parallel
provided by Eckhart's conception of the "creature". In so far as creature
is regarded by the German Mystic as what God is not, as vain, unreal and
non-essential, his thought comes very close to the Advaita view of the
world of maayaa-avidyaa. Adopting the Platonic rather than the Aristotelian
way of thinking, Eckhart characterises the world as a copy, an expression
of the eternal God, falling far short of the prototype. "All that is
created" he declares, "has no truth in itself. All creatures in so far as
they are creatures, as they "are in themselves" are not even illusion, they
are "pure nothing". All that is created is nothing". This declaration,
however, does not mean that the creatures have no empirical existence. They
do exist; but, as for Shankara, they exist through avidyaa. The two Masters
are not interested in the "how" and "why" of avidyaa so much as in the way
to its transcendence. How creatureliness is to be overcome is what they are
primarily concerned with.

Close as is the parallel between Shankara and Eckhart in reagard to their
metaphysical doctrines, closer still is their agreement over the practical
disciplines. Salvation or release and the means to it occupy the centre of
attention in the teaching of the two Masters. Like Shankara, Eckhart
considers, not equality with God, but identity with Him as the goal. "God
is the same one that I am" says Eckhart. This is almost the same as the
Upanishadic teaching, "That thou art" (tat tvam asi). The direct way to the
realization of transcendent unity lies not through occult practices or
ecstatic yoga but through divine knowledge or jnana. The soul has to come
to its true nature by discarding the assumed limitations, by renouncing all
"me and mine." It is by withdrawing inwards through knowledge that the soul
discovers its infinitude and divine glory.

After explaining the similarities between Shankara and Eckhart in his
penetrating comparative study entitled Mysticism East and West, Rudolf Otto
speaks about the differences also. One of the points of difference,
according to Otto, is that while Shankara's Brahman is static Being,
Eckhart's God is a living process. Another great distinction is that while
the goal for Shankara is the stilling of all karmas, all works, all
activity of will, for Eckhart the goal is never a static rest and the
"oneness" which the soul strives to gain is never closed as boundary, but
is continually opening afresh like a vault with an over-rising roof.
Stating the differences in other words, Otto observes: "Shankara knows the
atman in us but this Atman is not the soul in the Christina and Eckartian
sense; it is not "soul" as identical with 'Gomut', infinitely rich in life
and depth... Least of all is his Atman, "soul" in the sense of religious
conscience, which "hungers and thirsts after righteousness".... Sankara's
mysticism is certainly mysticism of the Atman but it is not mysticism as
Gomuts-mystik. Least of all is it a mystical form of justification and
sanctification as Eckhart's is through and through. And Shankara's
mysticism is none of those things because it springs not from the soul of
Palestine, but from the soul of India."

We are ready to acknowledge with Otto that there are differences. But we do
not agree with him when he says that Brahman is static Being, that moksha
is a state of passivity and that Shankara has no ethic because the
background of His teaching is not Palestine but India. Otto is evidently
wrong in several of the statements he has made about Shankara, as for
instance when he observes that "salvation in Brahman is for Sankara
realized only after death". The main difference between Eckhart and
Sankara, according to us, is that while the former is influenced by dogma,
the latter is not. Shorn of the elements of dogma, Eckhart should as
universal as Shankara is.

>From the Series - The Philosophy of the East and the West by TMP Mahadevan.


On Sun, Mar 9, 2025 at 8:33 AM Divya Shivashankar <divyameedin at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Sankara and Eckhart - By TMP Mahadevan
>
> Part 1
>
> Time and territory make no difference to the teachings of the Masterminds.
> The distinction of East and West has no relevance to "Perennial
> Philosophy". Great thoughts consitute the legacy of the entire mankind. No
> matter when a sage or saint lived, or where, his message has universal
> import. This truth may be exemplified by comparing two of the world's
> greatest teachers - Acharya Shankara and Meister Eckhart. Sankara lived in
> India, belonged to the Upanishadic tradition, and taught Advaita which, he
> was convinced, was the culmination of all philosophical thought and
> spiritual aspiration. Eckhart was born in Germany in the thirteenth
> century, belonged to the Dominican Order of monks, taught and wrote his
> sermons and works as a Prior or Provincial of the Catholic Church. Although
> the Indian Acharya, Sankara, and the German Meister, Eckhart, lived and
> flourished in different ages and hemispheres, they are "contemporaries" to
> use Rudolf Otto's expression;for, as he explains, "contemporaries in the
> deeper sense are not those who happen to be born in the same decade, bu
> those who stand at corresponding points in the parallel development of
> their environments."
>
> There is close similarity between the two teachers in their metaphysical
> teachings. According to both, the Ultimate Reality is the non-dual Spirit.
> Brahman, for the Advaita of Shankara, is one only, without a second,
> ekameva adviteeyam; without parts and without multiplicity, without any
> distinctions and differences, nirgunam, nirvisesham. For Eckhart also, the
> pure "Godhead" is Being though and through and nothing other than Being,
> without any addition and qualification. Reality, in fact, is beyond the
> reach of words, for the normal use of words is to distinguish and to
> differentiate. "Wouldst thou be perfecct, do not yelp about, God" says
> Eckhart. Citing an Upanishadic text, Sankara declares, "This Atman is
> peaceful, quiet", santo yam atma.
>
> Both the Masters contrast the Godhead with God, Brahman with Ishvara. The
> supra-personal Godhead is above God and is the round thereof. In the pure
> Godhead, there is transcendence of subject and object, knower and known.
> Referring to the conception of the Godhead, the One, the Absolute, in
> Eckhart, the American Philosopher, Josiah Royce, says that it is a old
> conception, much older than the Neo-Platonic. "It is almost identical", he
> goes on to observe, with the conception of the Absolute Self or Atman of
> the earliest Hindu speculation. But Eckhart, Knowing nothing, of course, of
> the remoter sources or counterparts of his conception, and himself learning
> it in the main from Dionysius discovers the everlastingly fresh and
> convincing verification of it in his own religious life."
>
> Just as the two Masters agree in their conception of the Godhead, they
> agree also in regard to the idea of God. Critics of Shankara wrongly make
> him on to be a non-theist, it not an atheist, even as the Churchmen branded
> Eckhart as a pantheist. The truth, however, is that both are theists.
> Simply because, according to Shankara, the knowledge of the personal
> Ishvara is lower knowledge, aparaa vidyaa, it does not mean that this
> knowledge belongs to the region of error, avidyaa. Saguna brahman is not a
> brahman different from the nirgunaa. Ishvara is brahman as the world
> ground. He is the efficient as "well as the material cause of the world.
> Shankara allows of no second beside God as the world cause. As Otto
> correctly understands, "The nirguna Brahman is not exclusive opposite of
> the saguna brahman, but it is superlative and a development of the
> tendencies which lead to the saguna brahman itself." Only, while Otto uses
> the term samucchaya (summing up) to describe Shankara's method of relating
> the saguna and the nirguna brahman, we would prefer the expression
> samanvaya (harmony).
>
> To be continued...
>