[Advaita-l] [advaitin] Re: Sankara and Eckhart - By TMP Mahadevan

[সপ্ত Rishi]

One way of thinking about how the various vertices of Eckhart’s thought are
connected to each other is to explore his nuanced approach to and use of
language in the pursuit of what his student, Heinrich Seuse (Henry Suso),
would later characterize in his widely read Horologium Sapientiae as the
highest form of philosophy, a philosophia spiritualis (one which Seuse took
Eckhart to embody). Not only does the Meister engage in a kind of “serious
play” with words and language in both his Latin and German writings, much
of his work ultimately revolves around the ways in which words, especially
understood as “signs” or “images”, can both reveal and obscure. This
tension is played out in a dynamic, distinctly Eckhartian dialectic that
moves back and forth between saying and “unsaying” (Sells 1994), univocity
and equivocity (Mojsisch 1983 [2001]; Wendlinder 2014), speech and silence
(Duclow 1984)—between the limits of finite human language and the
self-communication of the Divine Intellect in the “Eternal Word” (i.e.,
Christ). In fact, despite his strong apophatic tendencies, the speculative
aspect of Eckhart’s mystagogy might best be characterized as a philosophy
of the Word, according to which the second person of the Christian Trinity
(understood as the divine logos or scholastic ratio) represents the
metaphysical threshold between the human and the divine, as well as the
medium by which the timeless, singular Godhead (the “One” of Neoplatonist
philosophy) is “translated”—linguistically, epistemically, and even
ontologically—into the discursivity and multiplicity characteristic of the
grammar, thought, and very existence of creatures.

On Ekchart

On Sun, 9 Mar 2025, 17:10 Divya Shivashankar, <divyameedin at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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...
>>
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