Insight Editions · No. 150
Paths to Transcendence
According to Shankara, Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart
Reza Shah-Kazemi
Reza Shah-Kazemi compares Shankara, Ibn Arabi, and Meister Eckhart on the Absolute, spiritual realization, and the unity and differences among religious traditions.
A study guide to Paths to Transcendence by Reza Shah-Kazemi. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
Reza Shah-Kazemi puts one question to three of the greatest contemplatives of three religions: is the summit of the spiritual life one summit, or many? Reading Shankara, Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart each in his own terms, he finds that they describe the same transcendent realization, and that their differences belong to the slopes rather than to the peak.
Argument map
What the book is
Paths to Transcendence: According to Shankara, Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart was published by World Wisdom in 2006 in its series Spiritual Masters: East and West. It grew out of a doctoral thesis completed at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 1994, and it is dedicated to Frithjof Schuon. The author thanks his supervisor Dr. Peter Moore, Ghazi bin Mohammed for help between 1991 and 1993, Antony Alston for guidance on Shankara, and Dr. Martin Lings, who read the text and whom he calls "a living embodiment" of what the book discusses.
The book has a short introduction, four chapters and an epilogue, then an appendix that turns the results against academic theories of mysticism.
- Introduction (pp.xi-xiv): the theme of transcendence, the method, and the three questions put to each sage.
- Chapter 1, Shankara (pp.1-67): the Absolute, the ascent through scripture, meditation and grace, and the life of the one liberated while living.
- Chapter 2, Ibn Arabi (pp.69-129): the Essence and the Names, sainthood, the vision of God, extinction, servitude, and the unity of religions.
- Chapter 3, Meister Eckhart (pp.131-191): God and Godhead, detachment, the Birth of the Word in the soul and the Breakthrough, and poverty of spirit.
- Chapter 4, The Realization of Transcendence (pp.193-220): what the three hold in common and where they differ.
- Epilogue, Religion and Transcendence (pp.221-227) and Appendix, Against the Reduction of Transcendence (pp.229-252).
The main text runs to about 134,600 words.
Why these three
The author's choice is not arbitrary. They also cover three very different religious settings: a Hindu tradition that builds renunciation into its structure, an Islamic one centred on revealed Law, and a Christian one centred on the Incarnation and the sacraments.
This spread is what gives the comparison its force. If three teachers so differently placed describe the same summit in the same structural terms, the convergence is harder to explain as borrowing or as the product of one culture. The author does not argue from history at all. His evidence is the content of what the three say, read carefully in context.
Twelve ideas to carry in
- Transcendence is realized, not merely believed. "Realization" means making real, here and now.
- There is a level beyond the personal God. Brahman without qualities, the Essence, the Godhead.
- That level is not nothing. It is "beyond" Being only because it contains Being without limit.
- Speech fails at the top. All three sages use negation (apophasis) to point to the Absolute.
- Something in us is already divine. The Self, the "secret", the uncreated spark.
- The individual never becomes God. Only the divine in us realizes the Divine.
- Grace is required. Even the realization beyond the personal God depends on His grace.
- Virtue comes first. No one is taught the highest truth without it.
- Experience is the wrong word. At the summit there is no separate subject to have one.
- The realized sage returns. He is poor, devout, and sees God in all things.
- Forms matter. Religions are paths to the summit, not wrappers to be thrown away.
1. Orientation
The Introduction sets out what the book is looking for, how it will look, and why the answer matters. It also warns against the commonest mistake in the study of mysticism: taking the outward signs of the spiritual life for its goal.
A neglected theme
Shah-Kazemi describes his subject as "an important but much neglected theme in comparative religion and mysticism: that of transcendence". By transcendence he does not mean a doctrine about a God far away. He means "transcendent realization": the actual attainment, by a human consciousness, of what lies beyond every limitation, including the limitation of being an individual.
He chose three sages whom he places "of the highest rank": Shankara (the great teacher of Advaita Vedanta, non-dualism, in Hinduism), Ibn Arabi (the Andalusian Sufi known as the Greatest Master, al-Shaykh al-Akbar) and Meister Eckhart (the German Dominican preacher). For their lives he refers the reader to three biographies: Tapasyananda's version of the Sankara dig-vijaya, Claude Addas's Quest for the Red Sulphur on Ibn Arabi, and Oliver Davies on Eckhart.
Mysticism, he notes, covers an immense range, running "from the psychic to the imaginal". Visions, ecstasies, unusual powers and states all belong to it. None of them is the point. In one of the book's governing sentences: "It is all too easy to mistake the outward phenomena of mysticism for its goal".
Transcendence now, salvation later
The book separates two aims that religions offer. One is salvation in the Hereafter, a posthumous state of bliss. The other is transcendent realization here and now (hic et nunc). The author insists the two are not in competition. The second is the concern of the sages studied here; the first remains valid for believers and is, as the Epilogue will argue, itself already a path towards the second.
What the conclusion will be
The Introduction announces the result. The author concludes that "one can justifiably speak of a single, transcendent essence of spiritual realization, whatever be the religious starting-point". He adds an important limit: "unity in an absolute sense is only to be found at the level of the Absolute". Below the summit, religions and their mystics differ, and those differences are real.
He also states a motive. Because the highest is so easily counterfeited, he quotes the old Latin warning corruptio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst. He wants to set out the genuine article clearly enough to expose what he calls "the clear errors that are paraded as spiritual truths in our time".
Three words that need care
Absolute. The author uses this word for what has no limit of any kind, not even the limit of being a person or of standing in relation to a world. It is not one being among others, however great. Each sage has his own name for it: Brahman without qualities, the Essence, the Godhead.
Experience. In ordinary speech, mystics "have experiences". The book argues repeatedly that this word misleads at the summit, because an experience needs someone to have it and something to be had. Where the individual is effaced, there is no one left to have an experience of the Absolute. What remains is the Absolute knowing itself.
Transcendence. In theology the word usually means God's being above the world. Here it means the realization of what lies beyond every limit, including the limits of the individual who seeks it. The book treats four things as transcended at the summit: religion, individuality, the personal God, and finally transcendence itself, once it stops being an event and becomes a permanent way of being.
The appendix in advance
The Preface explains that the original thesis also contained a critique of academic theories, which became the Appendix, "Against the Reduction of Transcendence". It takes on Steven Katz, Robert Forman, W.T. Stace, Zaehner, Ninian Smart and Fritz Staal. The author's name for what they share is "the reduction of transcendence": explaining the highest spiritual states in terms that leave out what makes them highest.
2. Shankara: The Self That Is Brahman
Shankara's non-dualism gives the book its clearest vocabulary. The Absolute (Brahman) is beyond every name and form; it is "not thus, not thus"; and it is identical with the deepest Self (Atman) of every being. Liberation is not something produced. It is the removal of ignorance about what has always been the case.
Sources and approach
The chief source is the Upadesa Sahasri (Thousand Teachings), the work most securely by Shankara, together with his commentaries as translated in A.J. Alston's six-volume A Samkara Source-Book. Two short works traditionally attributed to him, the Atma-bodha and the Vivekachudamani, are less certainly authentic. Shah-Kazemi uses them anyway, as faithful to the teaching, and flags them where they matter.
The chapter has three parts, which set the pattern for the book: the doctrine of the Absolute, the ascent towards it, and the "return" of the liberated sage to the world.
Part I. Naming what cannot be named
"That from which words fall back"
The Upanishads describe Brahman as "That from which words fall back". Shankara draws the conclusion strictly: "hence the Absolute cannot be designated by any name, nor can it assume any form". Name and form (nama-rupa) belong to the world of ignorance. They are like the snake a man sees when he looks at a rope in poor light: real as an appearance, but not what is actually there.
To keep this from becoming mere confusion, Shankara distinguishes two points of view, a distinction the author calls "of the utmost importance":
| Perspective | Sanskrit | What it sees |
|---|---|---|
| Absolute, ultimate | paramarthika | Only Brahman; no second thing; no bondage, no liberation |
| Relative, conventional | vyavaharika | A real world, souls, a Lord, scripture, a path |
Almost every apparent contradiction in Shankara dissolves when one asks which perspective a given sentence is spoken from.
Defining without limiting
Even calling the Absolute "Atman", the Self, is a designation; its value is that it negates the body as the self. Shankara distinguishes a definition (laksana), which marks something off from what it is not, from a characterization (visesana), which adds qualities. Scripture's formula Satyam, Jñanam, Anantam is a definition in the first sense:
- Reality (satyam): that which never fails or changes.
- Knowledge (jñanam): that which is not non-conscious.
- Infinity (anantam): that which has no division into subject and object.
Each term removes something. None adds a boundary.
Neti, neti
The most famous formula is neti, neti, "not thus, not thus". Every category in which a thing can be described (genus, action, quality, relation) is denied of Brahman. The author lights this up with one of Shankara's stories: an idiot, told he is "not a man", becomes distressed until he is shown that he is not a "not-man" either. The negation is not a denial of reality. It clears away false identifications so that what is real can be recognized.
The author reads the double neti as two distinct negations. The first denies that the Absolute is the opposite of anything. The second denies that it can be measured against anything at all. It is neither this nor not-this.
False attribution and its withdrawal
How can a teacher speak at all? Shankara's method is adhyaropa-apavada: "That which cannot be expressed is expressed through false attribution and subsequent denial". The teacher first says the Absolute is the cause of the world, the Lord, the Knower; then withdraws each statement as the pupil matures. This is a "saving stratagem" (upaya). In Shankara's own words: "First let me put them on the right path, and then I will gradually be able to bring them round to the final truth afterwards".
A key technical term is upadhi, a limiting adjunct, defined as "that which, standing near (upa) anything, imparts (adhadati) to it (the appearance of) its own qualities". A red flower near a crystal makes the crystal look red. Body and mind near the Self make the Self look individual, active and suffering.
The two Brahmans and the Lord
Shankara speaks of a lower Brahman (Apara, saguna, "with qualities") and a higher Brahman (Para, nirguna, "without qualities"). The lower is Isvara, the personal Lord, Creator and governor of the world. His Lordship is real, but real relative to ignorance: as one moon looks like many to someone with defective eyesight, so the one Brahman appears as Lord over a world of many souls.
The power through which this happens is Maya-sakti, which Shankara calls the "seed of the production of the world". The Lord is both source of Maya and present within it. He is no subjective invention of the soul. Against anyone who thinks so, Shankara reverses the order: "First of all the Lord imagines the individual soul". He even offers an argument from design: "This world could never have been fashioned even by the cleverest of human artificers".
Being and Beyond-Being
The Absolute is first known as Being, then as the pure Self. Is it "beyond" Being? Yes, in two senses that match the double neti. It is not nothing; and it is not identical to Being as the principle of things. Shankara's reasoning is pointed: "If the Self were affirmed to exist, such existence would be transient, as it would not be different in kind from the existence of a pot". Brahman is neither Being nor non-Being. Being as such is the first actor, and so the first relativity; the Absolute behind it is a "seedless form" (nirbija-rupa).
This is the book's key move. Beyond-Being does not mean less than Being. It means Being without the limit that comes from standing in relation to a world.
How real is the world?
The world is "unreal like a dream". It "contradicts itself in successive moments". The logic is stated as a rule: "That which is non-existent at the beginning and in the end is necessarily so in the middle".
But Shankara is not simply denying the world. The rope-snake image cuts both ways: "the snake imagined in the rope is real when seen as the rope". Every effect is unreal as a separate thing, "because it is not perceived as distinct from its cause", as a jar is only clay. Seen in its cause, it is the real. This is why the liberated sage, as the Gita puts it, sees all things in the Lord.
Part II. The ascent
Liberation is not a product
Liberation (moksa) is the highest good (nihsreyasa). Spiritual life ranges through "more and more subtle and comprehensive effects", and the author stresses that what is objectively higher is subjectively deeper. Realization can, for the best prepared, be instantaneous on a single hearing of the truth.
Scripture
The Absolute "can only be known through the authority of Revelation". The Veda exists to "put an end to the distinctions imagined through ignorance". The great saying Tat tvam asi, "That thou art", serves "to end the conviction" that one is the individual soul.
Shankara's image is the man who counted his companions after crossing a river and found only nine, having forgotten himself: "the man who realized he was the tenth". Scripture does not give him new information. It removes an oversight. For, as Shankara says, "Indeed the Self is unknown (aprasiddha) to nobody." The Veda works gradually, even using desires and promised posthumous worlds as stratagems, and the gifted grasp it "when it is heard only once".
Action cannot liberate
Action involves agent, body, organs, life-energy and divine power: a whole apparatus of relativity. "Action is incompatible with metaphysical knowledge since it occurs to the accompaniment of ego-feeling", the sense of "I am the one doing" and "let this be mine". Hence: "Therefore metaphysical knowledge cannot require or receive support from action".
The verdict on ordinary life is sober: "That is exactly the condition of the very great majority of the people". Works have a real but limited role: "Work leads to purification of the mind, not to perception of the Reality. The realization of Truth is brought about by discrimination and not by ten millions of acts". For the seeker of liberation, Shankara can even say: "Even dharma is a sin", insofar as it binds.
Virtue as knowledge
Virtue is not optional. The Atma-bodha opens by addressing those who "have been purified from evil by constant austerities and have reached calm and peacefulness". Commenting on the Gita's list (humility, modesty, innocence, patience, uprightness, service of the teacher, purity, steadfastness, self-control, detachment, absence of egoism, equanimity, devotion), Shankara says these qualities are called knowledge "because they are conducive to knowledge".
The author draws two lessons. Pride is an intellectual malfunction, not just a moral one: it blocks perception of the truth. And humility prefigures the final extinction of the ego. Shankara's sharpest line: whoever "gives up the egoism that he is a Knower of Brahman, is a (real) Knower of the Self. Others are not so".
Rites, faith and renunciation
Ritual cooperates with the path of knowledge, which has three stages: hearing (sravana), reflection (manana) and meditation (nididhyasana). Alongside come six "treasures": calm, self-control, withdrawal, forbearance, concentration, and faith (sraddha).
Faith matters more than modern readers might expect: "If a person feels resentment against the Lord, he should not receive the teaching, even if he has all the other virtues under the sun". Devotion to the Lord and aspiration to the Self do not compete: "there are not two Absolutes, but one". And faith is practical: "When there is faith, the mind can be concentrated on the point one wishes to know about, and this enables one eventually to know it".
Rites are "remote auxiliaries" (arad upakaraka). At the end, the seeker turns from all lesser goods: "When the Self has once been known, everything else is seen as evil". Even heavenly worlds arouse "disgust". The ideal is the wandering monk (parivrajya); householders attain only exceptionally.
Meditation
Shankara distinguishes three grades of seeker. Those of lesser capacity follow worship of a deity (upasana) and reach liberation by stages (krama-mukti) through the world of Brahma, a conditioned immortality. The highest are liberated in this life (jivan-mukti).
He defines true meditation (dhyana) as the "withdrawal of the outward-going perception of the senses into the mind, and the one-pointed focusing of the mind on the source of its consciousness". The order matters: one may treat a charioteer like a king, but not the reverse. A lower thing may be worshipped as the higher, "as one projects the idea of Vishnu onto a stone image", but never the higher reduced to the lower.
Powers (siddhis) may arise on the indirect path, never powers of creation: "Only the Supreme Lord has the right to govern the universe". And because the Self is already accomplished (nitya-siddha), effort aimed at it is subtly self-defeating: "If it were thought that anything were needed to become one's own Self, it would not be one's true Self that one was aiming at".
The direct method is inquiry (vichara): neti, neti turned on the subject. The ego-notion, he says, arises from taking the Self to be a "this". Strip away every "this", as one might lose an arm without losing oneself, and what remains is not a blank. "The immediate experience that ensues is the Supreme Self".
Om and grace
Everything is Om. "This Om being something so magnificent, it should definitely be adopted as an instrument of approach to the Absolute". It is the name that fits closest; indeed "even the Absolute in its highest form is the syllable Om". Yet its purpose is "to dismiss name and named altogether and realize the Absolute, which is quite different from either". And Om is a channel of grace: "When it is used, the Self tends to pour out grace".
Interiorization
The method is adhyatma-yoga, which Shankara distinguishes from Patanjali's yoga. The intellect (buddhi) is the first to receive the reflection of the Self, as a jewel catches sunlight. "Bondage is nothing but a delusion of the intellect; the removal of this delusion is liberation". The Self "shines only in the intellect, like a reflection in a clear (mirror)". Thought (manas) is not knowledge (buddhi).
The dissolution runs from the senses into mind, mind into intellect, intellect into Hiranyagarbha (the cosmic intellect) and finally into the Absolute, "the highest possible summit of human experience". Its working principle is: "Whatever a man thinks of steadfastly and with unshakeable conviction that he soon becomes". At the end the intellect itself disappears.
Bliss, and beyond it
All joy is "a fragment of the Bliss of the Absolute". Worldly joy "only blossoms when the inner and outer conditions for it are present". The Bliss of the Absolute has no conditions: "But when the distinction set up by ignorance between subject and object has been abolished through knowledge, then what remains is the natural infinite Bliss alone, one without a second".
Here the author makes a point he will repeat about all three sages. The meditator nearing absorption meets "unutterable joy", but Shankara warns: joy comes, but "he should not pause to savor it". The Absolute "is unborn because it is not produced like anything resulting from empirical perceptions". To call it an "experience" is, strictly, a contradiction in terms.
Three states and the Fourth
Waking, dream and deep sleep are three states. Deep sleep prefigures liberation: the sleeper who says "I was conscious of nothing" testifies to a consciousness that was present. But sleep keeps the seeds of individuality; on waking, "there are distinctions just as before". In liberation those seeds are burnt "in the fire of the awakening to the sole reality of the Self". Shankara even calls ordinary waking a kind of sleep: "Sleep, defined as 'not-being-awake-to-reality' is present in the mental modifications of waking and dream". The Fourth (Turiya) is not a fourth state but the witness of all three.
| State | Name of the self | Relation to liberation |
|---|---|---|
| Waking | vaisvanara | Ignorance of reality, though active |
| Dream | taijasa | Subtle images; still ignorance |
| Deep sleep | prajña | Unity, but with seeds unburnt; an inverse image |
| Turiya | the Fourth | Not a state; the Self itself |
Samadhi is not the criterion
A well-known verse says: "By the Nirvikalpa Samadhi the truth of Brahman is clearly and definitely realized, but not otherwise". The author reads this carefully. The criterion is knowledge, not a state. The word samadhi denotes the Self "as it can be realized only by the knowledge arising out of the deepest concentration". How long a trance lasts is immaterial. In Shankara's words, with every other means of knowledge the "Veda itself disappears on enlightenment".
Who is liberated?
"It is not to the ego as agent that the experience of liberation falls". Identity (tadatmya) runs one way only: the drop is water, but water is not the drop. Consciousness "is not different in the individual soul and the Lord, just as heat is identical in fire and sparks".
Shankara's reflection theory (abhasa) explains the individual as a reflection of the Self in the mind. The reflection is the one that transmigrates and acts. It is "unreal", and "Bondage and Liberation, which are conjured up by Maya, do not really exist in the Atman". Yet liberation is fitly ascribed to the Self, "just as victory is fitly attributed to a king".
The Absolute is both "known" and "unknowable" "without there being the slightest contradiction". Those who merely talk about it are warned: they "are ruined both by their knowledge and by their action". The real knower has lost even the thought "I am the Absolute".
Grace
The author insists, against those who read Advaita as self-help, that Shankara teaches grace. "liberation of the soul can only come through knowledge proceeding from His grace". It happens "in the case of one or two perfect souls only". The Lord's image of himself is apt: "I am like fire: just as fire does not ward off cold from those who are at a distance". Grace is near; one must come near it.
Part III. The return
The author groups Shankara's teaching on life after realization under four heads.
The mind
A lower yogi may cry, "Oh, I am now fallen from the knowledge of the Self". The true knower cannot fall: the consciousness "I am Brahman" never leaves him. His certainty lives in the heart, not in the fluctuating mind. To the mind he can say that it is "of the nature of non-existence". He comes to "spontaneously enjoy" fearlessness and peace.
All is Brahman
"There is no other way to have knowledge of the inmost Self but this": to see the Self "through every cognition". "The truth is there is only clay". Foam and waves are only water. In the strictest teaching (ajati, non-origination), nothing was ever created, as a magician's rope trick creates nothing. The sage, "though seeing duality, does not see it". His perception "becomes seedless, has lost all germ of evil".
Remaining karma
What keeps the body going after liberation? Past actions already set in motion (prarabdha karma), like a potter's wheel that spins on after the potter stops: "Hence one has to wait until the energy of the action is exhausted". Other stocks of karma are burnt. "Final peace comes at the fall of the body".
The sage still acts, to set an example or maintain the body: "For want of egoism these actions do not pollute Me". Desire ends not by suppression but by fulfilment in the Self: "How does one become free from desires? By realizing them". Strictly, though, from the highest view "the existence of prarabdha work is meaningless", like asking how a man awake is connected to his dream.
Suffering
"Just as one does not identify oneself with the body of another, so does one not identify oneself with one's own body after vision of the Supreme". Pain depends on identification. Once "the notion 'I am the one with the ear-rings' is permanently cancelled", it does not return: "For pain and error, once cancelled, do not assert themselves again".
Devotion
Finally, and surprisingly for those who think of Advaita as cold, devotion continues. "Even great gods like Brahmà and Indra are pitiable beings in the eyes of that knower of the Self". Yet Shankara bows: "I prostrate to the feet of that Great Teacher". Of the highest truth he says: "we view it from the relative standpoint and adore it to the best of our ability". Many devotional hymns are attributed to him.
Shankara and the modern reader
Two features of the chapter correct common impressions of Advaita. The first is the place of the Lord. Shankara is often presented as a philosopher for whom God is simply illusion. The author shows the opposite: the Lord is real at his own level, imagines the soul before the soul imagines him, distributes the fruits of action, and is the source of grace. Faith in him is a condition of receiving the teaching. Devotion continues after realization.
The second is the place of discipline. Advaita is sometimes taught as an insight available to anyone who hears the right sentence. Shankara does say that the most gifted may realize the truth on one hearing. But he also requires virtue, renunciation, faith, a teacher in the lineage, long meditation and grace, and he warns that those who merely talk are ruined by their knowledge. The shortcut exists only for those who have already walked the path.
Shankara's teaching as a sequence
It may help to see Shankara's whole path as a sequence, as the author's material allows.
- Qualification. The seeker is purified by virtue and austerity, has calm and self-control, and has faith in the scripture, the teacher and the Lord.
- Hearing. He hears the great sayings, above all "That thou art", from a teacher in the lineage. For a very few, this is enough.
- Reflection. He removes doubts by reasoning on what he has heard, using discrimination between the Self and the not-self.
- Meditation. He withdraws the senses into the mind and focuses the mind on its source, often supported by Om, through which grace flows.
- Inquiry. He applies "not thus, not thus" to every "this" with which he identifies, until nothing objective remains.
- Realization. The Self knows itself. No individual achieves this; ignorance is simply removed, like the forgotten tenth man.
- Return. The body continues on its remaining karma. He sees all as Brahman, is untouched by pain, and remains devout until the fall of the body brings final peace.
The sequence is a teaching device, not a mechanism. Shankara insists that the Self is already accomplished and that nothing produces it. The steps remove obstacles; they do not cause the result.
Ascent: scripture, virtue, faith, renunciation, meditation, Om; grace throughout.
Summit: not a state but knowledge; the Self knows itself; no individual is liberated.
Return: unfalling certainty, seeing all as Brahman, residual karma, detachment from pain, continued devotion.
3. Ibn Arabi: The One Beyond the Names
Where Shankara begins from the all-inclusive Self within, Ibn Arabi begins from the all-exclusive Divinity above: "There is no divinity except the (one) Divinity". Followed to the end, that denial of any other reality rejoins the immanence Shankara started from. This part covers the doctrine: how Ibn Arabi received it, and how he distinguishes the Essence of God from God as Lord of the worlds.
Approaching the Greatest Master
Ibn Arabi was called al-Shaykh al-Akbar, the Greatest Master; the Latin equivalent the author uses is "Doctor Maximus". He claimed divine inspiration not only for the substance of his teaching but even for its expression.
The author sets out three caveats before starting:
- Only a small fraction of his writing has been translated. The two main works are the vast Futuhat al-Makkiyya (Meccan Illuminations) and the compact Fusus al-Hikam (Bezels of Wisdom).
- He is elliptical and does not build a neat system. Statements made from different points of view sit side by side.
- The chapter trades breadth for height. It follows the theme of transcendence, not the whole of his thought.
Sources include Austin's translation of the Fusus, the studies of William Chittick (The Sufi Path of Knowledge, The Self-Disclosure of God, Imaginal Worlds), Michel Chodkiewicz (Seal of the Saints and his edited Illuminations), Claude Addas, Henry Corbin, Toshihiko Izutsu, Titus Burckhardt, Michel Valsan's French translations, and Nicholson's Tarjuman al-Ashwaq. Where only French exists, the author translates, checking against the Arabic.
| Shankara | Ibn Arabi | |
|---|---|---|
| Starts from | The immanent Self, which includes all | The transcendent Divinity, which excludes all else |
| Formula | That thou art | No divinity but the Divinity |
| Ends at | The Self is Brahman beyond all | Nothing else exists, so the Real is the inmost of all |
Doctrine as fruit, not seed
For most of us, doctrine comes first and realization (if ever) later. For Ibn Arabi the order was reversed. His "opening" (fath) came before formal discipline (riyadah) and travelling the path (suluk). It came as a sudden "attraction" (jadhbah) at sunrise during his first retreat: "My opening was a single attraction in that moment".
Everything he later wrote was, he said, "only the differentiation of the all-inclusive reality which was contained in that look at the One Reality". He received it "even though I had not been seeking such knowledge". When the philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) met the young man, he was astonished that he had gone into retreat ignorant and come out knowing, without study, discussion, investigation or reading.
Each chapter of the Futuhat, he says, is a drop compared to the ocean he was shown. Of the Fusus he says it is "that which he (God) dictated to me, not all I was given, since no book could contain all of it". And yet he insists that a "definition of Reality is impossible".
The Level and the Essence
Ibn Arabi's central distinction is between the Level (al-martabah), that is the Divinity (al-uluhiyyah), God as God of a world, and the Essence (al-Dhat), God in Himself.
- Names, attributes and relations belong to the Level. "Allah" itself, the supreme name, is called "a name of the Level not the Essence".
- The Essence has no definition. "He who supposes that he has knowledge of positive attributes of the Self has supposed wrongly".
- "It is not correct for the Real and creation to come together in any mode whatsoever in respect of the Essence".
This is the equivalent of Shankara's higher and lower Brahman. The Divinity is real, and it is the God of the believers, but it is God in relation, not God as He is in Himself.
Incomparability and similarity
Ibn Arabi balances two moves. Tanzih declares God incomparable; tashbih affirms His similarity to creatures. Either alone is a mistake. Pure incomparability limits Him to being "not like" things, which is itself a limit. The author quotes Ibn Arabi to the effect that if He is declared incomparable in a way that removes Him from all similarity, then He is not He. Both are needed, and both are surpassed at the level of the Essence.
Shadow and imagination
The cosmos (al-kawn) comes into existence by the divine command "Be!" (Kun!, Qur'an 36:82). What is its status? Ibn Arabi uses the shadow: "The cosmos is, in relation to the Reality, as a shadow is to that which casts the shadow". A shadow has no being of its own; yet it is not nothing, and it shows the shape of what casts it. In one direction the shadow is other than its source; in another, the shadow "is nothing other than He".
The things of the world have their roots in "immutable entities" (a'yan thabitah), the eternal archetypes of each thing in God's knowledge. They receive existence (wujud) but never own it. Hence the famous line: "All existence is an imagination within an imagination, the only Reality being God".
Being and existence
The Arabic wujud means both "being" and "finding". The author uses the Latin root of "existence", ex-sistere, meaning to stand apart from, to bring out the difference between Being as such and existing things, which stand out from their source. Only God has wujud by right. Creatures are "existent" (mawjud) by borrowing.
Even imperfection has a place: "part of the perfection of existence is the existence of imperfection within it". The phrase anticipates Ibn Arabi's later claim that through man the Real knows itself "with imperfection".
The perfection of imperfection
The phrase about imperfection repays attention. A God without a world would lack nothing in His Essence, but the Names would remain hidden, unmanifest. The world is the place where the Names are shown, and it can show them only with limits. Its imperfection is therefore not a flaw in the divine plan but the condition of manifestation.
This idea leads to the hadith of the hidden treasure, discussed in Part 4: God loved to be known, and so He created. It also explains why Ibn Arabi takes creation more seriously than Shankara's strict non-origination does. The author treats this as one of the genuine differences between the two, and returns to it in Part 7, where he argues that it narrows once the full teaching of each is in view.
Unity and multiplicity
If God has ninety-nine Names, is He many? No. "The Names in their multiplicity are but relations which are of a non-existent nature". They connect the Essence to the possible things, much as the barzakh, the isthmus, connects two seas without being either.
Ibn Arabi (and his commentator al-Qashani) distinguishes two unities:
| Term | Meaning | Corresponds to |
|---|---|---|
| ahadiyyat al-kathrah | Unity of the many: the Names gathered in God | Divinity, Being, saguna Brahman |
| ahadiyyat al-ahad | Unity of the One: the Essence alone | Beyond-Being, nirguna Brahman |
The Names imply a relation of lord to vassal: there is no Lord without something lorded over. Ibn Arabi dramatizes this. In an imaginative scene the Names come petitioning, first to the Knowing, then to Allah, and finally to the Essence. The Essence replies: "All the divine names belong to the Level not to Me, except only the name One (al-wahid)".
The outcome is stated without softening: "Naught is except the Essence". And yet, the author stresses, Ibn Arabi does not fall into a flat pantheism, because "the transcendent Reality is the relative creature, even though the creature is distinct from the Creator". This non-reciprocal identity is the same structure as Shankara's drop and water.
What the doctrine asks of the reader
Ibn Arabi's doctrine can sound like abstract metaphysics, but the author reads it as a map for a journey. If the Names belong to the Level and not to the Essence, then every way of knowing God through His qualities, however true, stops short of God as He is. If the cosmos is shadow, then attachment to anything in it is attachment to a shadow. If the Real is the creature but not the reverse, then the creature can find the Real only by ceasing to claim anything as its own.
So the doctrine leads straight into the themes of the next two parts. The ascent is the passage from the Names to the Essence, through extinction. The return is the life of one who knows that he is, in himself, nothing, and that the Real alone is.
Doctrine flows from an opening, not from study.
The Level (Divinity, Names, Lordship) is distinct from the Essence, which has no name.
The cosmos is shadow and imagination: nothing in itself, the Real in its root.
Two unities: of the many and of the One. Only the second is absolute.
The Real is the creature; the creature is not the Real.
4. Ibn Arabi: The Ascent
Part II of the Ibn Arabi chapter treats three themes: the relation between sainthood and prophecy, the question of what is "seen" at the summit, and extinction (fana'). The middle theme carries a sharp argument against two of Ibn Arabi's best-known modern interpreters, Henry Corbin and Toshihiko Izutsu.
Sainthood and prophecy
Ibn Arabi holds that sainthood (walayah) is in one sense superior to prophethood. His reason: "This is because the office of apostle and prophet comes to an end, while sainthood never ceases". The saint (wali, "friend") bears a divine Name, al-Wali; "prophet" is not a Name of God.
But the superiority is within a person, not between persons. A prophet is also a saint, and his sainthood exceeds his prophecy: "this is so within one person". Prophets must "conform to the level of their communities", because "every governor is itself governed by that in accordance with which it governs". When a prophet speaks beyond the Law, he speaks as "a saint and a gnostic".
Orthodoxy is kept: prophets are greater than saints, and the Prophet of Islam is the greatest. Muhammad is the Seal of the Prophets and also of the Saints, the second seal being hidden and, Ibn Arabi claimed, manifested in himself. Saints are "inheritors" of prophets. In a dream he saw the Kaaba with two bricks missing, one silver and one gold: the silver for the Law, the gold for the inner reality.
The station of proximity
Between the rank of the truthful (siddiqiyyah) and prophecy lies the station of nearness (maqam al-qurbah). Those brought near (muqarrabun) include Law-bringing messengers, prophets without a Law, and saints.
The key distinction: "Ranking according to excellence (tafadul) takes place in accidental perfection, but not in essential perfection". Differences between messenger, prophet and saint are accidental. The two halves of Qur'an 42:11, "Nothing is like Him" and "He is the Hearing, the Seeing", match the Essence and the Divinity. Accidental perfection, the putting on of divine traits, is still a prerequisite: it is "accident for accident", the human virtues answering to the divine qualities.
The gazelle and the Night Journey
Ibn Arabi describes a revelation in the form of a poem about a gazelle on the Night of Power: "Realizing that I am the very being of that which I love, I no longer fear separation nor do I fear abandonment". The author sees two interiorizations here: from formal revelation to its formless essence, and from the manifestation to its source.
On his own spiritual ascension (mi'raj), Ibn Arabi received Qur'an 3:84, which names the prophets and forbids distinguishing between them: "Henceforth I knew that I am the totality of those (prophets) who were mentioned to me (in this verse)". He calls this the "key to all knowledge". At the end of the journey, "He returned me to myself."
Behind this stands the hadith of the hidden treasure: "I was a hidden treasure and I loved to be known, so I created." Man is the mirror in which God sees Himself: "For the seeing of a thing, itself by itself, is not the same as its seeing itself in another, as it were in a mirror". Thus "Through me the Real acquires the perfection of its being, with imperfection".
Moses and al-Khidr
The Qur'anic story of Moses following the mysterious al-Khidr (18:65), who performs three acts Moses cannot accept, is read inwardly. "He [al-Khidr] showed him [Moses] nothing but his own form; so it was his own state that he beheld, his own soul with which he remonstrated".
A further rank exists beyond even the truthful. When the Prophet died, Abu Bakr steadied the community by reminding them that whoever worshipped God should know that God is living and does not die. Yet Ibn Arabi speaks of "another station by virtue of which he is not governed by the state of siddiqiyyah". Its people include the "solitary ones" (afrad) and the people of blame (malamiyyah), to whom Part 5 returns.
Is the summit a vision of one's own form?
Here the author picks a fight. Corbin and Izutsu both read Ibn Arabi as teaching that the highest attainment is a vision of God's self-disclosure (tajalli) shaped by the seeker's own archetype. Corbin wrote: "What a man attains at the summit of his mystic experience is not, and cannot be, the Divine Essence in its undifferentiated unity". He speaks of a heavenly "companion-archetype". Izutsu agreed: "The Absolute on the level of Unity, in other words, remains for ever unknowable".
Ibn Arabi does say that "the recipient sees nothing other than his own form in the mirror of the Reality". He cites Junayd: water takes the colour of the cup. And he says: "so do not seek nor weary yourself in any attempts to proceed higher than this, for there is nothing higher".
The author's reply turns on a phrase: this is true fi haqqi'l-makhluq, "according to the right of the created thing". The creature as creature cannot see the Essence. But that is not the end of the matter. On Qur'an 18:110, "Let him not associate (any) one with his Lord's worship", Ibn Arabi comments: "For Unity does not know you and will not accept you". And again: "There is no one who sees the Absolute except the Absolute".
| Corbin and Izutsu | Shah-Kazemi | |
|---|---|---|
| Highest attainment | Vision of a theophany shaped by one's archetype | Extinction in which the Essence alone knows itself |
| The Essence | Forever unknowable | Unknowable to the creature, known by itself |
| Basis | Texts on vision | Texts on vision plus texts on fana' |
| Verdict | The author calls their reading "an unwarranted exclusivism" | |
Vision is a matter of He and not-He, an "imagined reality". Even it depends on grace: "this identification [with divine knowledge] represents a mode of divine assistance predestined for the particular individual". The summit lies elsewhere, in extinction.
Why the dispute matters
The quarrel with Corbin and Izutsu is not academic point-scoring. If they were right, Ibn Arabi would stand apart from Shankara and Eckhart: his summit would be a vision of God shaped by the seeker, not the realization of the Absolute. The book's thesis would then fail for one of its three witnesses.
The author's answer depends on reading two sets of texts together. The texts on vision describe the highest the creature can attain as a creature. The texts on extinction describe what happens when the creature is no longer there. Corbin and Izutsu, he argues, read the first set as if it were the whole teaching. Once extinction is taken into account, Ibn Arabi's summit is the same as Shankara's and Eckhart's: the Absolute knowing itself, with no creature left to see.
Extinction (fana')
Fana' is a state (hal), not a station (maqam). The difference: "Every station in the path of God is earned and fixed, while every state is a bestowal, neither earned nor fixed". "The hal is one of the favors which the All-Merciful accords through an act of pure Providence". Extinction is a gift, not an achievement.
The Arabic itself carries the doctrine: wujud (being), wijdan (finding) and wajd (ecstasy) share one root. "wujud [Being] is finding the Real in ecstasy". The author notes the parallel with Being-Consciousness-Bliss.
The relation between the creature and the Real is inverse. "The essence of divine reality is too elevated to be contemplated", as long as a trace of the creature remains in the one who looks. Seventy thousand veils of light and darkness intervene. Moses, met in the sixth heaven, says: "I did not see God until I had died". Junayd: "When He is there, thou art not, and if thou art there, He is not".
"The Inward says no when the Outward says I". And: "If the I subsists during the manifestation of Him, one will then have You". The vision of the Throne expresses the reversal: "He made His Throne to be a couch for me, the kingdom a servant for me, and the King to be a prince to me". The "I" who speaks here is not the individual but the divine Self.
Oneness and the limits of the creature
Al-Qashani distinguishes the exclusive Oneness of the One (ahadiyyah) from the inclusive Oneness (wahidiyyah). At the exclusive level, man is "not a thing remembered" (Qur'an 76:1). The creature as such never becomes God: "It is impossible for realities to change, so the servant is servant, and the Lord Lord". "Lordship is the relationship of the He-ness to an entity".
"Creation is the barzakh (isthmus) between Light and darkness". Hence: "So nothing sees Him but He. You, in respect of your entity are identical with shadow, not light". At the end "Naught save the Reality remains", and "There is no arriving and no being afar". Even the alternation of spiritual contraction (qabd) and expansion (bast) is balanced: "A gnostic can never be contracted without expansion or expanded without contraction".
The method: retreat and invocation
The method is the spiritual retreat (khalwah), whose meaning is emptiness: the heart emptied so that "nothing can fill it but Him". Preparation comes first: right intention, observance of the Law, control of the imagination, and training (riyadah), defined as the "training of character, abandonment of heedlessness, endurance of indignities".
The practice is invocation (dhikr): "it is your saying 'Allah, Allah,' and nothing beyond 'Allah.'" Graces and visions will come; they are to be passed by. "If you stay with what is offered, He will escape you. But if you attain Him nothing will escape you".
The stages are vivid: "you are eradicated, then withdrawn, then effaced, then crushed, then obliterated". The composite human being is dissolved element by element until only the "specific aspect" (al-wajh al-khass), the unique link of each being to God, remains as the last barrier. Ibn Arabi records his cry: "Enough, enough! My bodily elements are filled up, and my place cannot contain me!"
And from another account, in Chodkiewicz's version: "this Named One was the object of my contemplation and this Essence was my own Being". Servanthood and identity are two faces of one realization. The gnostic is 'arif bi-Llah, knower by God.
Two gnoses
Ibn Arabi distinguishes two kinds of knowing God: "knowing Him as knowing yourself", and "knowing Him through you as Him, not as you". The second is higher. It is the meaning the Sufis read into the definition of spiritual excellence (ihsan): to worship God as if you saw Him. Read with a pause, the Arabic says "if thou art not, thou seest Him".
Inexpressibility and ecstatic sayings
Abu Bakr said: "To understand the inability to understand is understanding". Ibn Arabi corrects the emphasis: "his knowledge does not imply an incapacity to know, it implies the inexpressible".
He then compares two famous claims. Pharaoh said: "I know of no god for you apart from me" (28:38), an exclusive claim, made by the ego. Abu Yazid al-Bistami said "I am Allah" and, quoting 21:25, "There is no god if it be not Me". The difference is that a creature may only claim inclusive immanence, never exclusive transcendence. The transcendent is realized "by way of immanence". The saints "saw their essences as one essence".
Sainthood is the inner face of prophecy and never ends.
Ranks belong to accidental perfection; the Essence is beyond rank.
The beatific vision is the highest for the creature as such, not the highest possibility.
Extinction is a gift; in it "nothing sees Him but He".
Method: retreat, invocation, passing by every grace offered on the way.
5. Ibn Arabi: Return and Universality
After extinction comes subsistence (baqa'). Ibn Arabi's "return" is marked by radical poverty and servitude, by an ordinary outward life that hides an extraordinary inner one, and by a vision of God in every form. It ends in his most famous teaching for our time: that every revealed religion is a light, and that the heart of the gnostic is "capable of every form".
Poverty and servitude
The realization that closes the ascent was the knowledge that he was a pure servant. The author finds this the key to Ibn Arabi's return. Spiritual poverty (faqr) is not an ascetic practice but an ontological fact: the creature has nothing of its own, not even its existence.
Two terms frame the return. Extinction is temporary; subsistence is permanent: "Subsistence is a relationship that does not disappear or change", "But annihilation is a relationship that disappears". The human state remains: "It is impossible for you to cease being human, for you are human in your very essence".
Ibn Arabi guards against the opposite error too: "The ultimate illusion is for a person to bring together Lord and servant through wujud". The realized servant is one from whom "no whiffs of lordship are smelt". When a spiritual master exercises authority, he is only a "locus for the flow of the properties of lordship".
Is the servant then unfree? Ibn Arabi's answer is subtle. As an immutable entity in God's knowledge, the creature "remains free in the state of possessing nonexistence, like the freedom of the Essence in Its Being". Considered in its own entity it is free; considered in its readiness to receive existence (isti'dad) it is poor: when "the possible thing clings to its own entity, it is free, with no servanthood; but when it clings to its preparedness it is a poor servant".
Two kinds of servanthood
Ibn Arabi distinguishes servanthood ('ubudiyyah), which still refers the servant to himself, from servitude ('ubudah), which refers him only to God: "Servitude is the ascription of the servant to Allah, not to himself". Servitude is the higher of the two. The servant who has reached it "sits in the house of his immutability, not in his existence, gazing upon the manner in which God turns him this way and that".
A dialogue between the ecstatic al-Hallaj and the humble Uways makes the point. The first soul a man meets is "his own soul, not that of another". Ibn Arabi praises the one "who is upon a form which requires such an elevated station and which has no effect upon him and does not bring him out of his servanthood". He also speaks of a "servanthood that does not accept emancipation".
Obligatory over supererogatory
The famous holy tradition says that through supererogatory devotions (nawafil) the servant draws near until God says "I am his hearing by which he hears", and so on. Most Sufis read this as the summit. Ibn Arabi ranks obligatory works higher. The author gives four reasons drawn from his texts:
| Supererogatory works give | Obligatory works give |
|---|---|
| a state (passing) | a station (permanent) |
| God affirmed in the individual's faculties | the individual effaced, God alone affirmed |
| free will (chosen acts) | necessity (commanded acts, pure obedience) |
| identity with the attributes | identity with the Essence |
In Ibn Arabi's phrase, "obligatory works give him the fact of being nothing but light".
The people of blame
The highest saints are the malamiyyah, the "people of blame", also called afrad, solitary ones: "those who know and are not known". They show nothing outwardly. Their way lies "in the abandonment of freedom and enslavement to that which wisdom demands", wisdom being to put each thing in its place.
Of such a saint Ibn Arabi says: "Transcendence of the customary order will become his secret, so that events beyond the ordinary will accompany him ordinarily". Above all he keeps the Law, the strongest of the secondary causes, because it "holds in its grasp the light by which one can be guided in the darknesses of the land and sea of these secondary causes".
Withness: seeing God in all things
The returning saint is poor towards secondary causes but not blind to them. The causes "block everyone who takes them as lords". "A person's ears must rend all these veils to hear the word 'Be!'".
"God is the Manifest who is witnessed by the eyes and the Nonmanifest who is witnessed by the intellects". Once this is seen, after this "he is never ignorant of Him or veiled from Him". The key verse is Qur'an 57:4: "He is with you wherever you are". Union (wasl), for Ibn Arabi, is the witnessing of this withness: "perceiving the seer to be the same as the seen".
Ibn Arabi ranks those who return to guide others (mardudun) above those who remain absorbed (mustahlikun). He met Aaron in the fifth heaven, who spoke of this. The movement from retreat (khalwah) to manifestation (jalwah) is the movement from seeing God apart from things to seeing Him in them. Even then, the saint's being a place of manifestation does not give him existence of his own: "by being a locus of manifestation he does not acquire existence".
The heart and "no station"
The highest saint, the Muhammadan, has no fixed station: "His station is that of no station". The heart (qalb) is named from a root meaning to turn or fluctuate, because it follows "the divine self-transmutation in forms". Hence the holy tradition: "My earth and My heaven do not contain Me, but the heart of My believing servant does contain Me".
Two analogies govern the returner's life. An inverse analogy: his poverty reflects God's freedom. A positive analogy: his bliss reflects God's bliss. Paradise is renewed at every instant, and so is the world. "Boredom is the greatest proof that man has remained ignorant of God's preserving his existence and renewing his blessings at each instant". For the gnostic, "every thing in this 'habitual' course is itself an object of marvel".
The universality of religion
This fourth theme is unique to Ibn Arabi among the three sages. It rests on the verse he called the "key to all knowledge" (3:84) and on the distinction of form and essence: every religion is relative in its form and absolute in its essence. The author draws out three points.
1. The necessary Word and the accidental Word
Many details of a revealed Law arise from circumstances: "Many of the rulings instituted by the Law have come through questions posed by the community". On the Night Journey the daily prayers were reduced from fifty to five, yet God says: "They are five and they are fifty: the Word changes not with Me". Ibn Arabi distinguishes the necessary Word (al-qawl al-wajib) from the accidental Word (al-qawl al-ma'rud).
2. One path, many Laws
Abrogation (naskh), the replacement of one Law by another, is read as supersession, a "sitting above", not annulment. The image is the sun and the stars: when the sun rises, the stars are not destroyed, only outshone. "All the revealed religions [shara'i'] are lights". Ibn Arabi explicitly rejects the view that abrogation renders them null.
His vision of Moses illustrates it: what one Law forbids, another permits, "from the formal standpoint". "So the roots coincided, without disagreement on anything".
3. The religion of Love
In the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq Ibn Arabi wrote of the young woman Nizam: "She has baffled everyone who is learned in our religion, every student of the Psalms of David, every Jewish doctor, and every Christian priest". The scriptures concern the Names: "All the sciences comprised in the four Books (Qur'an, Psalms, Torah, and Gospel) point only to the Divine Names and are incapable of solving a question that concerns the Divine Essence".
And: "I follow the religion of Love". The author is careful about this line. The Muhammadan saint "does not stop with a specific revelation", but this is not syncretism. It is a view from the summit, held by someone who kept the Law to the letter.
The God created in belief
Ibn Arabi's advice: "He who counsels his own soul should investigate during his life in this world, all doctrines concerning God". "He should not deny it or reject it, for he will gather its fruit on the Day of Visitation". "For God is exalted high above entering under delimitation".
Each believer worships "the God created in belief", and that God is the first to receive Mercy. Hence "everyone will end up with mercy. For it is He who created them (the diverse beliefs)". The warning is direct: "Beware of being bound up by a particular religion and rejecting others as unbelief!" And positively: "Try to make yourself a Prime Matter for all forms of religious belief".
But a narrow believer "believes only in a god that he has subjectively" posited in his own mind. "Behold how the degrees of men concerning their knowledge of God correspond exactly to their degrees concerning the seeing of God on the day of Resurrection". On that Day, a hadith says, God will transform Himself (yatahawwal), and some will deny Him in forms they do not recognize.
The image is water and cup: "Water remains in its own definition and reality, whether in the cup or outside it. Hence it never loses the name water". "He who delimits Him denies Him in other than his own delimitation", whereas the gnostic "acknowledges Him in every form within which He undergoes self-transmutation". The only punishment for narrowness is deprivation of the fullness of bliss.
Universality without relativism
Ibn Arabi's teaching on religions is often quoted as if it made all beliefs equal. The author reads it more carefully. Every belief contains God, because God created it and discloses Himself in it; so every believer receives mercy in the end. But beliefs differ in how much of God they contain, and so believers differ in the vision of God they receive. The narrow believer sees only the god of his own belief; the gnostic sees God in every form.
This is a hierarchy, not a relativism. Revealed religions are lights; idols are given the name "god" though their proper name is stone or wood. What decides is the divine command: prostration by God's command brings felicity. The universality Ibn Arabi teaches belongs to the summit, where the heart receives every form, and it is held together with strict observance of the Law below. The heart that is "capable of every form" belongs to one who has kept his own form perfectly.
After fana' comes baqa': the servant remains a servant, without a trace of lordship.
Servitude ('ubudah) outranks servanthood; obligatory works outrank supererogatory.
The highest saints are hidden, keep the Law, and see marvels in the ordinary.
All revealed religions are lights; one supersedes another as the sun outshines stars.
The heart of the gnostic receives God in every form of belief.
6. Meister Eckhart: Godhead, Birth and Breakthrough
Eckhart's problem is the reverse of Ibn Arabi's. Where Ibn Arabi's transcendent teaching is buried in a huge body of writing on other subjects, nearly everything Eckhart preached aims at the summit. His sermons are about one thing: the Birth of the Word in the soul, and the Breakthrough beyond God into the Godhead.
Sources and shape
The author relies on Eckhart's German sermons and treatises in M. O'C. Walshe's translation, with some help from C. de B. Evans, rather than the Latin scholastic works. The Birth (Geburt) of the Word in the soul is both the summit and the criterion of Eckhart's teaching. His dialectic can shock: a prayer for "this" or "that", he says, is a prayer for evil.
The chapter has three parts: the doctrine of God and Godhead; the ascent (virtue and detachment, then the Birth and the Breakthrough); and the return.
Part I. From God to Godhead
Speaking about what cannot be said
"Whatever we say God is, He is not; what we do not say of Him, He is more truly than what we say He is". Eckhart is aware that doctrine of this kind cannot simply be passed on. "Whatever can be truly put into words must come from within, moved by its inner form". He warns his hearers: "unless you are like this truth we are about to speak of, it is not possible for you to follow me". And: "He who has abandoned all his will savours my teaching and hears my words".
Thoughts about God, however true, obstruct the Birth. Can a man reach it through ideas of God as good and wise? "In fact, he cannot". The divine nature is "to be without nature". "The mere thought obscures essence", "for all admixture causes alienation from essence". For "good and perfected people", Eckhart says, "the very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within".
God and Godhead
The intellect, Eckhart says, "is satisfied with nothing less than the solitary One". "Being is the first Name" of God; but beyond Being lies the Godhead. Evans describes the distinction as a process which reduces God first to the Father. The author maps it this way:
| Eckhart | Meaning | Shankara | Ibn Arabi |
|---|---|---|---|
| Godhead (Gottheit) | Beyond-Being; the "silent desert" | nirguna Brahman | the Essence |
| Father | Being; source of the Persons | Isvara (Sat) | the Divinity |
| Son, Word | Logos; the speech of God | (Chit) | the Names |
| creatures | "pure nothing" in themselves | name and form | shadow, imagination |
"God is spoken and unspoken. The Father is a speaking work and the Son is the speech at work". The Persons arise within Being; the Godhead lies beyond them. "Even if there were a hundred Persons in the Godhead", the point would stand.
Eckhart's image is a citadel in the soul so simple that for God "to see inside it would cost Him all His divine names and personal properties". There is "neither Father, Son, nor Holy Ghost". The intellect "is as little satisfied with God as with a stone or a tree", meaning with God as one thing among others.
"I was bare being and the knower of myself in the enjoyment of truth". The author points out that this sentence names being, knowing and enjoyment: a precise echo of Being-Consciousness-Bliss. Before creatures existed, Eckhart says, God was not yet "God"; He became God in relation to creatures.
"God and Godhead are as different as heaven and earth". "God works, the Godhead does no work". The Godhead "never peeped at any work". In Sermon 67: "what is one in many things must needs be above those things".
Beyond being, not below it
"Masters of little subtlety say God is pure being. He is as high above being as the highest angel is above a midge". Eckhart's ladder has three levels: the Persons working; being, which is already a work; and bare "beingness" deprived of all being. "One is the negation of the negation and a denial of the denial". "He is beingless being".
Creatures, by contrast, are nothing in themselves. The papal Bull of 1329 condemned the thesis "All creatures are pure nothing". The author shows it means what Shankara meant by the unreality of the world apart from Brahman, and what Ibn Arabi meant by the shadow. Eckhart also takes up the patristic saying "God became man that man might become God".
Why the Godhead is not a fourth Person
A reader new to Eckhart may suspect that the Godhead is a rival God behind the Trinity. The author shows why this is a misreading. The Godhead is not another being; it is the one divine essence considered without the relations that make it Father, Son and Spirit. Those relations are real, and Eckhart preaches them, but they belong to God as He works and speaks. The Godhead is the same God as He is in Himself, silent and without work.
This is exactly the relation of nirguna to saguna Brahman, and of the Essence to the Level in Ibn Arabi. In each case the higher term is not a second God but the one God beyond the relations by which He is God of a world. Beyond-Being is not more beings, but Being without limit. The author returns to this point in Chapter 4, where he answers the objection that Ibn Arabi's unity of Being leaves no room for anything beyond it.
Part II. The ascent
Virtue and detachment
The teaching is "not of the natural, undisciplined man". Virtue is presupposed. But Eckhart goes further: "You should traverse and transcend all the virtues, drawing virtue solely from its source". The supreme virtue is detachment (Abgeschiedenheit), which the author reads as an ontological condition, not merely an ethical one.
Eckhart's images of attached piety are memorable:
- Merchants in the Temple, who do good works "in order that our Lord may give them something in return".
- The cow: some love God as they love a cow, "for her milk and her cheese and your own profit".
- The candle: "treating God like a candle with which to look for something".
- The doves: the dove-sellers are not driven out with the merchants. Their attachment "is not wrong, but it is a hindrance to the pure truth"; they act "with attachment, according to time and tide, before and after".
Detachment is not a loss: "I say it is putting away suffering, for nothing but joy follows this practice". Particular goods hide the good: this and that "good adds nothing to goodness, rather, it hides and covers up the goodness in us". Instead: "When you have God, you have all things with God". And yet "He who seeks God alone, in truth finds God but he does not find God alone".
Even our merits are not ours: "But our bliss lies not in our activity, but in being passive to God". Of another's good work, the Pope's included, he says "they are more yours than his" if you love it more. "In love I am God more than I am in myself".
Eckhart rejects a cosy devotion: seeking God by the fireside and not in the stable "is nothing but taking God, wrapping a cloak round His head and shoving Him under the bench". He sets detachment above love: love "constrains me to love God, but detachment compels God to love me". On the hundredfold reward: "You must give up yourself, altogether give up self, and then you have really given up". And "the less we seek or desire it, the more God gives".
Prayer for naught
"If I pray for someone I pray at my weakest". The Bull of 1329 condemned his view that whoever prays for this or that prays for evil. A pure heart's prayer "consists of nothing but being uniform with God". The practical rule: "he should pray for God's will alone and nothing else, and then he gets everything".
The Birth of the Word in the soul
Grace is indispensable: "God is always ready, but we are unready. God is near to us, but we are far from Him. God is in, we are out. God is at home, we are abroad". Even "the highest intellect arises in the understanding and cries to God for grace".
The goal is not imitation but identity: "you must not merely be like the Son, you must be the Son yourself". Eckhart quotes Augustine: "What does it avail me that this birth is always happening, if it does not happen in me?" And he answers the question of the Incarnation: "Why did God become man? That I might be born God Himself".
Christ took on "bare human nature and not any man". So the soul must "go out of all that which the eternal Word did not assume". Then "The Father can only give birth, the Son can only be born", and "The hearer is the same as the heard in the eternal Word". "In that real union lies the soul's whole beatitude".
Nothingness, unknowing, imagelessness
"If you could naught yourself for an instant", God would be born. "As long as you mind anything at all, you know no more of God than my mouth knows of color or my eye of taste". "If you want to be perfect, you must be rid of not". God "upholds her Nothingness and preserves her in His Something".
Knowledge gives way to a higher unknowing: "To him who knows nothing, it appears and reveals itself". In the end "our unknowing will be ennobled and adorned with supernatural knowing".
Images must go: "So leave all images and unite with the formless essence". "The least creaturely image that takes place in you is as big as God", because it takes God's place. The exchange is exact: "Go right out of yourself for God's sake, and God will go right out of Himself for your sake!" "Absolute stillness for as long as possible is best of all for you".
The silent middle
"The soul works through her powers, not with her essence". The lower powers (lower intellect, anger, desire, the senses) and the higher (higher intellect, memory, will) are stilled. In the "silent middle", the essence of the soul, the Word is spoken. "There God enters with His all, not merely with a part".
Eckhart also speaks of rapture (gezucket), which the author renders "enstasis", citing St Paul caught up to the third heaven. Such states are a gift: "God in His mercy veils it when He will and reveals it when He will".
Intellect and grace
There is "a power in the soul" of which Eckhart says that if the soul were wholly of that kind "she would be uncreated and uncreatable". "It is one in unity, not in likeness". This is the famous spark, which "touches God naked and grasps Him in His essence".
Knowledge outranks love, because love is caught at the gate of goodness: "Therefore knowledge is better, for it leads love". And grace itself is surpassed: "even grace is a creature". The author compares this to Shankara's lower Brahman: grace comes from God, but the ground lies beyond God. "In her ground she receives nothing but God barely". At the same time, the attainment of that ground "must be by grace".
The Breakthrough
The Birth is not the end. "The spirit is in bliss then because it has been born, and not at being born". Beyond the Birth lies the Breakthrough (Durchbruch) into the Godhead: "my breakthrough will be far nobler than my outflowing". There "No one missed me, for there God unbecomes".
"And just as He breaks through into me, so I break through in turn into Him". The destination is "the silent desert into which no distinction ever peeped of Father, Son, or Holy Ghost". There "it is more one than it is itself". And yet the identity runs one way: "the soul becomes divine, but God does not become the soul", as a drop in the ocean.
"What was above has become inward". The author sees here the same law as in Shankara and Ibn Arabi: the inmost is the highest.
The eye and the wood
Eckhart says that one who understood this image would "get to the bottom of all that I have ever preached about": when the eye sees wood, eye and wood are one in the act of seeing. The knower becomes what he knows. "Thus we are changed into God that we may know Him as He is", as fire changes wood into itself. God's order is the reverse of nature's: "God makes the man before the child, and the hen before the egg", and "God gives the Holy Ghost before He gives the gifts of the Holy Ghost".
The highest intellect says: "Thus I realize that I need no one any more". "God grasps God, God makes God in the soul". Eckhart's outer, inner and inmost man correspond to creature, Creator and Godhead: the inmost man savours God's gifts "not as God's gift, but as eternity".
The parable of the nobleman who went to a far country (Luke 19:12) gives the two movements: going out, to be one in oneself and see God alone; returning, by "being aware and knowing that one knows God and is aware of it". The goal, from Hosea 2:14, is to be "one with One, one from One, one in One, and a single One eternally".
Part III. The return
Action
The Holy Ghost flows into people "according as they are in greater or lesser degree born purely of God alone". Following Augustine, "it is in the nature of the good to diffuse itself", and the inner birth "runs over and floods into the powers and into the outward man". Good action then arises simply: "Whatever good you can do takes place and presents itself to you together in a flash, concentrated in a single point".
Slips still happen: "In this life we can never be quite free from such incidents". But "since God began the work He must bear the damage". Such a man "can in no way lapse into mortal sin". The outer man obeys the inner.
Seeing God everywhere
From the Talks of Instruction: "praying is a better task than spinning, and the church is a nobler place than the street. But in your acts you should have an equal mind and equal faith and equal love for your God". "It is not the works that sanctify us but we who should sanctify the works". "Those in whom being is slight, whatever deeds they do amount to nothing".
As a man learns to write until writing needs no effort, the detached man learns God "so that God's presence shines for him without any effort". Then "He is altogether our own, and all things are our own in Him". The image is the sun: "just as a man who stares long at the sun sees the sun in whatever he afterwards looks at". "God is closer to me than I am to myself". Yet blessedness lies not in God being in me, as He is in a stone, but in knowing it.
Suffering
"When everything is perfect joy to you, then your child has really been born". Eckhart says that if his father and friends were slain, it "would leave my heart untouched". Yet "never was there a saint so great but he could be moved". Moved, but not turned from God, like an anchored boat.
"There is one power in the soul to which all things are alike sweet". "But when nothing can comfort you but God, then God will comfort you". He "who loves only God in creatures, and creatures in God only, that man finds real and true and equal comfort everywhere".
Christ's sorrow in Gethsemane touched only the outer man. Eckhart's image is a door and its hinge: the door swings, the hinge stays still. So "the inner man remained in unmoved detachment". For such a man "Discomfort serves him as comfort, grief as well as joy".
Poverty of spirit
The sermon on "Blessed are the poor in spirit" (Matthew 5:3) is the author's main text for the return. "A poor man is one who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing". Of those who make poverty a matter of pious practices: "I say they are asses with no understanding of God's truth". The author compares the jolt to a Zen master's.
| Poverty of | Eckhart's demand |
|---|---|
| Will | to "be as free of his created will as he was when he was not" |
| Knowledge | to "be free of all the understanding that lives in him" |
| Having | not to be a place for God, but that God "is Himself the place where He works" |
The most startling line: "Therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of God". The ground is where "the highest angel, the fly, and the soul are equal, there where I stood, and wanted what I was and was what I wanted". "Thus God is free of all things and so He is all things".
Detachment, humility, and the wife
In On Detachment the soul returns to "his image when he was in God, wherein there was no difference between him and God". "Therefore God is bound to give Himself to a detached heart". Detachment and humility imply each other: "perfect detachment cannot exist without perfect humility". "For the reason why God is God is because of His immovable detachment".
Finally, fruitfulness. A virgin who stays a virgin bears nothing. "Wife" is the nobler name: "herein the spirit is a wife, whose gratitude is fecundity". What praises God? Likeness, as a picture praises its painter. "That which one can praise with words is a paltry thing, and so is prayer with the lips". The author calls this ontological worship. Humility, charity, praise, devotion and gratitude keep their highest value.
Eckhart's dialectic
Eckhart's style needs a word of its own. He states the highest truths in deliberately shocking form: pray to be free of God; those who practise pious exercises for reward are asses; whoever prays for this or that prays for evil. Several such statements were condemned in the papal Bull of 1329.
The author reads them as dialectic, aimed at a particular audience. The nuns and friars Eckhart preached to were already devout; their danger was attachment to devotion itself, to consolations, to reward. His hyperbole aims to break that attachment and open the hearer to something higher. Read literally, as instructions, the same sentences would destroy the religious life that Eckhart himself lived and presupposed.
That is why the author is careful to show the other side of Eckhart: his insistence on virtue, his own prayers appended to sermons, his teaching that humility and detachment are inseparable, and his submission of his case to the Pope. The dialectic is a means, not a programme. The same distinction returns in the Appendix, where Staal and Huxley are said to mistake dialectical hyperbole for practical instruction.
Ascent: virtue, detachment, prayer for naught, stillness; the Birth of the Word; the Breakthrough.
Summit: one-ness, not united-ness; the drop becomes ocean, not the reverse.
Return: works without why; God seen everywhere; the hinge unmoved; poverty, humility, praise.
7. The Common Summit
Chapter 4 asks the question the whole book has been preparing: do the three sages realize the same transcendence? The author's answer is that the question can be "answered emphatically in the positive". He then tests the answer against every point of difference he can find, and argues that each is a difference of emphasis, method or context, not of the summit itself.
The verdict and its frame
The author's conclusion aligns with what Frithjof Schuon called the transcendent unity of religions: religions differ in form but meet at the level of the Absolute. Shah-Kazemi is careful about scope. He is not claiming the religions are the same, nor that their mystics have identical experiences. He claims that the content realized at the summit is one, because the Absolute is one.
The chapter has three movements: doctrine, the ascent, and the return. In each, the author first states what is common and then examines what seems to differ.
Part I. Doctrine and what lies beyond it
Dogma and the supra-dogmatic
All three hold doctrine as necessary at first and inadequate at last. The author calls the content beyond dogma "unramified": not a rival doctrine but the undivided source of every true one. All three are apophatic. Shankara has neti, neti. Ibn Arabi says the Essence has no definition, since it has no attribute. Eckhart says that whatever we say God is, He is not.
All three affirm one Absolute: Shankara's non-duality (advaita), Ibn Arabi's Essence, Eckhart's "solitary One". All three place a first relativity, Being, just below it: Isvara or saguna Brahman (Sat), the Divinity with its Names and its creative "Be!", and the Trinity of Persons "suspended in Being", as the author puts it.
| Level | Shankara | Ibn Arabi | Eckhart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beyond-Being | nirguna Brahman; Turiya | the Essence (al-Dhat); Oneness of the One | the Godhead; "silent desert" |
| Being | Isvara, saguna Brahman | the Divinity (al-uluhiyyah); the Names | God; Father, Son, Spirit |
| Creative principle | Maya-sakti | the command Kun! | outflowing; "He wrought being" |
| World | name and form; snake in rope | shadow; imagination | "pure nothing" in itself |
| Inmost self | Atman | the "secret"; specific aspect | the spark; the ground |
| Method of naming | false attribution, then denial | tanzih with tashbih | negation of negation |
An objection answered
One might object that Ibn Arabi, famous for the "unity of Being", cannot accept anything beyond Being. The author replies that Ibn Arabi recognizes degrees within one Being, and that his Essence plays exactly the role of Beyond-Being: it is described by the Divinity but not limited by it. Shankara even says that "That which we designate as the Creator is the Absolute". The author distinguishes three planes: the cosmic, the plane of divine existentiation, and the plane beyond all causality, where all development of manifestation comes to rest (prapañcha-upasama).
One Absolute, or three?
Could the three sages each be describing something different? The author answers on two levels.
- Negatively, all three deny every conception. Their apophatic disjunctures, by refusing every limit, converge rather than diverge.
- Positively, Eckhart's spiritual inclusiveness, Ibn Arabi's water in the cup and Shankara's limiting adjunct (upadhi) all say the same thing: the Infinite can be received in many forms, and its very infinity excludes any single conception of it.
Part II. The ascent compared
Virtue: a shared prerequisite
Eckhart presupposes the Christian precepts. Shankara counts the virtues as knowledge and treats pride as an intellectual dysfunction. Ibn Arabi teaches "assuming the character traits of God" and makes accidental perfection the precondition of retreat. On this point there is no difference at all.
Ritual and action: a real difference, softened
Here a genuine difference appears. Ibn Arabi and Eckhart keep the rites of their religion to the end. Shankara's highest seeker renounces them. The author does not hide this. He explains it and reduces it.
| Factor | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Context | The renunciate (sannyasin) is built into Hindu tradition. In Islam and Christianity, abandoning rites would be heretical innovation. |
| Motive | Shankara's point is that action cannot cause Liberation, not that rites are worthless. Eckhart also calls those who seek heaven as reward asses, and his doves are a hindrance. |
| Doubled relativity | Action entrenches relativity twice: in the agent, and in the personal God as other. All three relativize both. |
| Proviso | Shankara allows rites for example's sake; Ibn Arabi performs them as symbols. |
| Function | For Shankara rites are "remote auxiliaries to knowledge", instrumental in removing the demerit of past sins that obstructs knowledge. |
| Exceptions | Shankara admits that householders also attain. |
The author's verdict: the difference is "substantially modified, albeit not totally overcome". There is no essential contradiction. Shankara's two kinds of renunciate, the one who sees inaction in action and the one who still acts for the Lord, give an exact key to Eckhart's merchants and doves.
Methods of ascent
All three relativize the vision of God as an other. At first sight Ibn Arabi differs: for him the vision is wholly divine, an effusion of the Most Holy, whereas for Shankara alterity is simply illusion. The author shows the difference is apparent only, since Shankara also says the Creator is the Absolute. All three say: do not stop at bestowals; exclude images.
Shankara's adhyatma-yoga works by abstention and dissolution. Ibn Arabi dissolves the composite in retreat. Eckhart stills the powers so the Word can be spoken in the silent middle. In each, the inmost essence of the soul is identical with the transcendent Essence, and in each the identity is non-reciprocal: Shankara's tadatmya; Ibn Arabi's statement that the transcendent Reality is the relative creature, not the reverse; Eckhart's drop in the ocean. Eckhart's eye and wood matches Ibn Arabi's gazelle.
The divine Name is a common support. The traditions say the Name is the Named. Om and Allah correspond. Yet as Shankara puts it, the purpose of knowing the identity of name and named is to dismiss both and realize the Absolute.
| Method | Shankara | Ibn Arabi | Eckhart |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hearing the truth | Yes, can suffice for the best | Opening may precede discipline | Sermons presuppose readiness |
| Concentration by abstention | Yes, adhyatma-yoga | Yes, in retreat | Yes, the main method |
| Invocation of the Name | Om, with grace | Central: "Allah, Allah" | Not emphasized |
| Discrimination, inquiry | Central: neti, neti | Implicit | Implicit in unknowing |
The difference is relative: Shankara offers several methods, Ibn Arabi centres on invocation, Eckhart speaks only of concentration through abstention.
Bliss and transcendence
All three say: go beyond bliss. Ibn Arabi warns not to stop with what is offered. Eckhart says love is caught at the gate. Shankara says not to "pause to savor it". Yet all three place Being, Consciousness and Bliss at the summit: Shankara's "unutterable joy", Eckhart's "whole beatitude", Ibn Arabi's ecstasy (wajd). The resolution: relative bliss grows by stages and has conditions; absolute bliss is unborn and unconditioned. It is not a state of bliss that defines realization. The word "experience" misleads, and deep sleep, with its seeds unburnt, is only an inverted image of the summit.
Transcendent union
In all three, consciousness persists while the individual is nullified.
- Eckhart: the soul finds its whole identity and being in the Godhead, has "no God", and begets its own begetter.
- Ibn Arabi: the contingent is removed; the Named is contemplated as one's own Being; the King becomes a prince.
- Shankara: the arm is cut off; "I am Brahman"; immediate experience (anubhava) is the Supreme Self.
On the indirect path of worship, identity with the Lord is transient and partial, and the Lord alone governs the universe. Even the god Brahma is an object of pity to the knower of the Self. The author finds "perfect accord", noting only that the claim causes less scandal for Shankara, whose tradition treats it as the highest orthodox truth.
Agency: who realizes?
"Only the Self knows the Self". The basis is a pre-existing identity. Ibn Arabi's second gnosis, knowing Him through you as Him; Eckhart's teaching that to know the Father one must be the Son, the Son's knowledge being the Father's self-knowledge; and Shankara's Self that knows itself by unborn Knowledge: these are one doctrine. Enlightenment involves no particular consciousness and no empirical means of knowledge.
The whole process is in a sense illusory. Bondage and liberation are "conjured up by Maya". Eckhart: "No one missed me". Ibn Arabi: "There is no arriving and no being afar".
How then does the individual know anything of it? Through Shankara's reflection theory. The reflection is the only agent, insofar as there is any agent. As reflection, it knows that the identity has been realized; as limitation, it remains a ray, not the sun. The knower has "the conviction in his own heart that he has direct knowledge of the Absolute and is also supporting a physical body at the same time". Ibn Arabi says his voyage was only in himself.
Grace
All three require grace. Shankara: Om pours out grace, and liberation comes through knowledge proceeding from His grace. Eckhart: the gift of the Holy Ghost; the soul's breakthrough answers God's breakthrough. Ibn Arabi: extinction is a bestowal. Since nothing proceeds from the Essence without relativizing it, grace comes through the personal God, and so faith and devotion are prerequisites and they last.
Part III. The return compared
Poverty and freedom
Eckhart and Ibn Arabi share the same ontological poverty: the creature has nothing. Eckhart's asses and Ibn Arabi's lesser servanthood both mark the volitive poverty that falls short of it. Shankara, by contrast, speaks the language of freedom: "I am the Real".
The author explains the contrast as one of emphasis. Shankara speaks from the absolute standpoint (paramarthika) and leaves the illusoriness of the individual implicit. Ibn Arabi and Eckhart speak from the individual's side and leave the identity implicit. From the individual's view, realization is poverty; from the view of its content, it is fullness. Ibn Arabi's freedom "like" the freedom of the Essence is a reflection, and the author stresses the word "like". The ego becomes "the first stranger" (Ibn Arabi) or the man "across the sea" (Eckhart).
| Viewpoint | Realization appears as | Emphasized by |
|---|---|---|
| The individual | poverty, servitude, nothingness | Ibn Arabi, Eckhart |
| The content realized | freedom, plenitude, "I am Brahman" | Shankara |
Suffering and prayer
All three teach the sage's inner immunity: the jivan-mukta's indifference, Ibn Arabi's servant in the house of his immutability, Eckhart's acceptance. Ibn Arabi and Eckhart speak of God's will; Shankara of impersonal karma, though Isvara as Inner Controller distributes its fruits.
One "important difference" remains: Eckhart's door and hinge and his refusal of petition versus Ibn Arabi's Job, who prays for relief. The author mitigates it in two ways. Ontologically, all prayer is relative to the one who prays. Contextually, Eckhart was being dialectical. In a footnote the author cites Oliver Davies: the nuns Eckhart preached to lived a religious life dominated by petitionary prayer, and he was correcting an excess. Ibn Arabi, conversely, faced lesser Sufis who thought patience ruled out prayer. And Eckhart himself appended personal prayers to his sermons.
Devotion and praise
The returners are devout. Shankara salutes the knowledge of Brahman, adoring "from the relative standpoint". Eckhart sets the fruitful wife above the virgin. Ibn Arabi speaks of "accident for accident". In all three devotion is strengthened, not abolished, by realization, because the grace that brought it came through the personal God.
The world: theophany or illusion?
The deepest apparent difference concerns creation. For Ibn Arabi the cosmos is the Name "the Outward" and is taken seriously: "What, do you think that We created you only for sport?" (Qur'an 23:115). For Shankara, in the strict doctrine of non-origination (ajati), nothing was ever created; the world is a snake seen in a rope.
The gap narrows on inspection. Shankara also says there is only clay in the pots and only water in the waves; he holds that Being is both efficient and material cause (satkarya-vada); saguna Brahman appears as the world, while in nirguna Brahman manifestation comes to rest. Ibn Arabi's Names are themselves "imagined", so the world is imagined too. Eckhart calls creatures "pure nothing" yet sees God's perpetual overflow in them. In each, the world is real or illusory depending on the point of view. Man stands between, at once "the transient, the eternal".
What the comparison does not claim
It is easy to overstate the author's conclusion, so it helps to list what he does not say.
He does not say that the three religions are the same, or that their doctrines are interchangeable below the summit. He says the opposite: unity in an absolute sense is found only at the level of the Absolute.
He does not say that every mystic of every religion reaches the summit. His three sages are chosen as being "of the highest rank". Most mystical life, he notes at the start, lies between the psychic and the imaginal.
He does not say that the differences between the sages are unreal. Some, like the difference over petitionary prayer, he calls important. His claim is that they concern the path and the manner of return, not what is realized.
And he does not say that his conclusion can be proved to someone outside the realization. He offers a convergence of testimony, read closely, and argues that it is best explained by a single summit.
One Absolute, beyond Being, known apophatically.
Virtue, grace, faith and devotion required by all three.
Interiorization: the inmost is the highest; identity is non-reciprocal.
Real differences: rites, methods, prayer, emphasis on poverty or freedom, the status of the world.
Each difference concerns path, context or viewpoint, not the summit.
7a. Three Sages on Fifteen Questions
This editor's part sets the three sages side by side on the questions a modern reader is most likely to ask. Every answer summarizes material quoted in Parts 2 to 7; nothing here goes beyond the book. Use it as a quick reference, then go back to the chapters for the arguments.
The questions
| Question | Shankara | Ibn Arabi | Eckhart |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. What is the Absolute? | Brahman without qualities; Reality, Knowledge, Infinity | The Essence, with no attribute and no definition | The Godhead, "beingless being" |
| 2. Is there a level below it that is still divine? | Isvara, the Lord, saguna Brahman | The Level or Divinity, with its Names | God as Trinity, the Father as Being |
| 3. How should we speak of it? | False attribution, then denial; neti, neti | Incomparability with similarity | Negation of negation; silence |
| 4. What is the world? | Name and form; real as Brahman, unreal as other | Shadow, imagination, theophany | Pure nothing in itself; God's overflowing |
| 5. What in us is divine? | Atman, the Self | The "secret", the specific aspect | The spark, the ground |
| 6. What must come first? | Virtue, faith, the six treasures, a teacher | Intention, the Law, training of character | Christian virtue, then detachment |
| 7. What is the main method? | Hearing, reflecting, meditating; inquiry; Om | Retreat and invocation of "Allah" | Stilling the powers; imageless concentration |
| 8. What should be passed by? | Powers, bliss, heavenly worlds | Visions, graces "offered" on the way | Images, consolations, "this and that" |
| 9. Is grace needed? | Yes: liberation proceeds from His grace | Yes: the state is a bestowal | Yes: the soul cries to God for grace |
| 10. What is the summit? | The Self knows itself; "I am Brahman" | Extinction: "nothing sees Him but He" | Breakthrough into the silent desert |
| 11. Who realizes it? | Not the ego; the reflection insofar as any agent | Not the creature as such; the Real in it | Not the soul in her own; God in His own |
| 12. Is the identity mutual? | No: drop is water, water not drop | No: the Real is the creature, not the reverse | No: the soul becomes divine, God not the soul |
| 13. How does the sage act? | Without ego, for example or the body's sake | As pure servant; keeps the Law; hidden | Without why; from a single point |
| 14. How does he suffer? | Pain cancelled with identification | Patience with prayer, like Job | Outer door moves, inner hinge stays |
| 15. How does he regard other religions? | Not addressed directly | All revealed religions are lights | Not addressed directly |
Reading the table
Three patterns stand out.
First, agreement is strongest at the top and bottom of the table. On the nature of the Absolute (questions 1 to 5) and on the non-reciprocal identity at the summit (questions 10 to 12), the three sages say the same thing in different vocabularies. This is the core of the author's thesis.
Second, differences cluster in the middle. Methods (question 7), the role of rites, and the handling of suffering (question 14) vary. These are exactly the points the author treats as differences of path, context or emphasis. The variation is real, but it lies where one would expect variation if the summit were one and the starting points many.
Third, only Ibn Arabi addresses the plurality of religions (question 15). Shankara and Eckhart worked within a single tradition and had no need to. The book's universalist conclusion therefore leans on Ibn Arabi for its explicit statement and on the convergence of all three for its evidence.
Three portraits of the realized sage
The return is where the three sages' personalities show most, and the author's material lets us draw three short portraits.
Shankara's jivan-mukta is serene and free. His certainty, "I am Brahman", never leaves him. He sees the world as clay seen in pots, acts without ego until his remaining karma runs out, does not identify with the body's pain, and still bows to his teacher and sings hymns to the Lord. His language is the language of freedom, because he speaks from the standpoint of the Self.
Ibn Arabi's returner is a pure servant. He knows he has no trace of lordship. He sits "in the house of his immutability", watching how God turns him. He keeps the Law scrupulously, hides his sanctity among the people of blame, prays like Job when he is afflicted, and sees marvels in the most ordinary events. His heart takes on every form in which God discloses Himself, and he follows "the religion of Love". His language is the language of poverty, because he speaks from the standpoint of the creature.
Eckhart's detached man works "without why". Good actions present themselves to him together, in a single point. He sees God in all things as one who has stared at the sun sees it everywhere. His outer self may be moved by grief while the hinge within stays still. He wants nothing, knows nothing and has nothing, so that God is Himself the place where God works. He is humble, grateful and fruitful, a "wife" rather than a virgin.
Three objections a reader might raise
Isn't this just reading Christian and Islamic texts through Vedanta? The author begins with Shankara because his vocabulary is the most explicit, and the danger is real. But he reads Ibn Arabi and Eckhart at length in their own terms, and he records where they resist the Vedantic frame: Ibn Arabi on the reality of creation, Eckhart on petition. The parallels are argued from the texts.
Does Shankara's "Even dharma is a sin" make him antinomian? No. The saying is addressed to the seeker of liberation and concerns dharma only insofar as it binds. Rites remain remote auxiliaries that remove the obstacles of past demerit, the sage still acts to set an example, and faith in the Lord is a condition of being taught at all.
If the summit is beyond religion, why keep religion? Because, the Epilogue argues, the path to the summit runs through religion. Grace comes through the personal God; virtue and faith are prerequisites; and attempts to go round the forms end in pretension.
8. Religion, Transcendence, and the Critics
The Epilogue draws the practical lesson: the summit lies beyond religion, but the only way there runs through it. The Appendix then turns the book's findings against modern academic theories of mysticism, arguing that each, in its own way, reduces transcendence to something less.
Epilogue: surpassing, not bypassing
The Epilogue's formula is that the sages are "surpassing, but not bypassing" religion. "To transcend religion is very different from subverting it". The same principle applies to the other two things the summit goes beyond: individuality and the personal God.
Faith and virtue are the "life-blood" of the path. Without them, "instead of the infinitude of pure consciousness there are but the vagaries of indefinite pretension". The author's sharpest sentence is aimed at his own era: "there is nothing more pretentious than for the individual to believe that, because he conceives of something which transcends the personal Divinity, he can bypass God in his quest for transcendence".
Grace and experience
Grace is redefined in the book's terms: it is "that ontological attraction exerted by the transcendent Essence upon the innermost consciousness of the individual". It is the process by which immanence rejoins transcendence.
A fourth thing is transcended: transcendence itself, when it ceases to be a state and becomes a permanent manner of being. That is why experience-seeking misses the point. "The thirst for experiences and the aspiration for transcendence are in fact poles apart". The chain is strict: without self-effacement there is no grace, and without grace there can be no transcendence.
| On the path, though he may not know it | Off the path, though he may think otherwise |
|---|---|
| The ordinary believer with faith, religion and virtue, who is ipso facto moving towards the summit | One with a cavalier attitude to religion, a pseudo-metaphysical marginalizing of the personal God, disdain for human virtue, and a hunger for tangible experiences |
Continuity and discontinuity
There is continuity between salvation and realization. The author says, with an "almost": "realization is salvation herebelow, just as salvation is realization in the Hereafter". The qualification allows for degrees of Paradise as for degrees of mystic attainment.
There is also discontinuity between path and summit. In Shankara's words, the causes of liberation are not of the nature of its fruit. The Absolute contains a relativity, the personal God; the relative contains an absoluteness, the immanent Self. Hence: "The individual may have an "experience" of God, but can never "realize" Him". And language, mediated by the individual mind, "cannot adequately express that which nullifies the foundation of its own operation".
Objections met
- Shankara addresses his own mind as illusory. Does that not use the mind to deny the mind? The author answers that Shankara speaks from the Self's viewpoint, borrowing the mind as instrument.
- Is Being-Consciousness-Bliss a positive claim? Yes, but it is realized in an infinite mode, and then passed through neti, neti.
- Is the path ever finished? The path has a beginning but no end, the inverse of Maya, which has no beginning but does have an end. Ibn Arabi's subsistence after extinction is "transcending transcendence". The Absolute remains known and unknowable. Total identity awaits the fall of the body.
The book closes on Ibn Arabi: the final end of the gnostics is "that the Real is identical with them, while they do not exist".
Appendix: against the reduction of transcendence
The Appendix has four targets. Each, the author argues, explains transcendence in terms that remove it.
| Critic | Thesis | Author's reply in a line |
|---|---|---|
| Steven Katz | Contextualism: all experience is mediated; there are no pure experiences | True of the individual; the summit transcends the individual and so the context |
| Robert Forman | A "pure consciousness event", empty of content, is common to mystics | Emptiness of thought is not the plenitude of the Absolute |
| W.T. Stace | A universal core; introvertive vs extrovertive types | Misses what in us witnesses the extinction |
| R.C. Zaehner | Monists vs theists; Shankara's God is nothingness | Misreads Shankara on illusion, the Lord and grace |
| Ninian Smart | Numinous vs mystical religions; union vs identity | The types cross; union and identity are two moments |
| Fritz Staal, Aldous Huxley | Technique matters; doctrine and rite are superstructure | Forms are the path; essence transcends and conserves them |
Katz and contextualism
Katz's "constructivism" denies that there are any "pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences". In his words: "All experience is processed through, organized by, and makes itself available to us in extremely complex epistemological ways". He dismisses claims to a meta-ontological truth as metaphysical naivety.
The author's reply has several layers.
- Every analysis reduces. Katz objects to a priori approaches, but has his own. He "conceals his own a priori judgment behind the veil of academic objectivity": the assumption that everyday experience is absolute and that the individual and his context are poles that cannot be surpassed. He thus absolutizes the relative and relativizes the Absolute.
- The study's own reduction is justified by intention. The author reduces in favour of the ontological status of the claims, because that is what the mystics intended.
- Experience implies duality. Katz is right about experience; the sages say the summit is not an experience. Thought is bound to the individual; when individuality is transcended, so is context. The uncreated intellect, Atman-Brahman, the essence of Adam that is al-Haqq, has no room in Katz's scheme.
- Relativism refutes itself. In a footnote the author quotes Schuon: "The axiom of relativism is that 'one can never escape from human subjectivity'; if such be the case, then this statement itself possesses no objective value, it falls under its own verdict".
Katz claims scripture shapes the mystic's experience. The author answers from the texts: the Veda disappears at enlightenment; Christ brought a blessedness that was "our own"; prophecy is subordinate to sanctity; the four Books point only to the Names.
On invocation, Katz says language determines experience. The author answers with the idea of sacramental presence: "that something of the Absolute enters into language". The analyst too, he suggests, should be "poor" before the evidence.
Forman and the pure consciousness event
Forman describes waking in a retreat with "no content for my consciousness", noticed only when someone knocked at the door: "The experience was so unremarkable, as it was utterly without content". He takes such events as the common core of mysticism.
The author's objections: there is no bliss here, and it is a mere cessation of thinking. It resembles a samadhi with seeds intact (sambija) minus its bliss, or deep sleep, which is only an inverted image of the summit. Turiya lies beyond. Forman himself admits the event is not ultimate or salvific. When he applies it to Eckhart, making the Godhead the "content" of contentlessness, he mistakes plenitude for emptiness. Eckhart's own words are telling: where the creature stops, God "begins" to be. Silence is necessary, not sufficient. The general lesson: what is "similar in phenomenological terms may be quite different in spiritual" terms, and in terms beyond phenomena.
Stace and the universal core
Stace distinguishes introvertive mysticism (inward unity) from extrovertive (unity seen in the world). The author argues the extrovertive vision is simply how the introvertive realizer sees the world on return. Stace also wrongly treats the Godhead and higher Brahman as the void side of a paradox; they are void only from the relative viewpoint.
His comment on Tennyson, that "it was Tennyson who experienced the disappearance of Tennyson", misses the point. Something beyond the individual takes note: Eckhart's spark, Ibn Arabi's "secret", Shankara's reflection. Stace's options of dualism, monism and pantheism ("identity in difference") are all inadequate. Nor did Eckhart contradict himself when he accepted papal correction: the author's formula is identity and difference together.
Zaehner and the monist
Zaehner made Shankara's God "absolute nothingness". The author lists the errors. For Shankara illusion is relative reality, not nothing. The Lord is the Inner Controller (Antaryamin). Shankara refutes atheists, uses the argument from design and has the Lord distribute karma. He teaches grace. The monist is not identical with the Creator as individual.
Zaehner thought theists and monists can never agree. Shankara's school says otherwise: "the non-dualist does not conflict with the dualist", because "non-duality is the ultimate reality, therefore duality or multiplicity is only its effect". Its image is the man on an elephant who does not fight the lunatic who thinks he too rides one. And the Lord is not "a deity which one has oneself imagined": the Lord imagines the soul first.
Smart: union and identity
Smart contrasts numinous religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) with mystical ones (Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism). The author accepts this as provisional but notes that Ibn Arabi and Shankara cross the line. Smart's organizing concepts are union and identity.
Shankara criticizes those who are one with the Self only during trance. The doll in a sense returns. Total identity awaits the fall of the body. The author's formula: union de facto, identity de jure.
The twentieth-century Shaykh al-'Alawi (in Martin Lings's A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century) describes what remains of man as "a faint gleam which appears to him as the lucidity of his consciousness", until he realizes "that the Infinite alone is". There is no self except the Self. The theist's union corresponds to samadhi with seeds and to saguna Brahman; the jivan-mukta sees distinctions, but not as before.
Staal, Huxley, and reductive universalism
The author's conclusion supports a universalist position, but not a reductive one. Mysticism is inconceivable without its religious setting.
Fritz Staal's Exploring Mysticism urges the student to accept meditation techniques from a guru but not his doctrine: "it is equally important that the student of mysticism does not turn into a follower of the guru". Doctrine is superstructure, "which is added and which is often worthless if not sheer nonsense". The author replies that for Shankara the guru brings scripture (agama) and lineage (parampara); that meditation is action and needs teaching; that faith is a prerequisite; and that obedience without belief is futile and dangerous.
Aldous Huxley's Perennial Philosophy rightly insists on transformation of character, but treats rites as dispensable. For Shankara they are remote auxiliaries, and invocation carries a special unitive grace. Both men "mistake dialectical hyperbole for practical instruction". Eckhart submitted his case to the Pope; Davies contrasts him with Margaret Porete, burnt as a heretic in 1310.
The sentence is Schuon's description of esoterism, which the author offers as the summary of his position. Forms are paths to one essence; their differences are relative but real on their own level. The summit, the realization of the Self as Being, Consciousness and Bliss, is one.
What the Appendix achieves
The Appendix does two things at once. Negatively, it shows that each academic theory leaves something out: Katz the transcendence of the individual, Forman the plenitude of the summit, Stace the witness that survives extinction, Zaehner the subtlety of Shankara, Smart the crossing of his own types, Staal and Huxley the necessity of the forms.
Positively, it clarifies what the book has been claiming all along. The summit is not an experience, not a psychological state, and not a product of technique. It is the realization by the Absolute of itself, through a human being who has been prepared by religion, virtue and grace and who has been effaced as an individual. Every theory that starts and ends with the individual as the measure of what can be known will, on this view, miss it by definition.
Transcend religion by going through it, never round it.
Grace is the attraction of the Essence on the inmost consciousness.
Katz absolutizes the context; the summit transcends the individual who has a context.
Forman mistakes empty awareness for the plenitude of the Absolute.
Staal and Huxley keep the essence but throw away the path to it.
9. Reading the Footnotes
Much of the book's argument lives in its notes: the choice of translations, the cross-references between traditions, and asides that sharpen a point made in the text. This part collects the ones a reader is most likely to want.
Sources and translations
- Shankara. Alston's six-volume A Samkara Source-Book is cited by short titles: Absolute, Creation, Soul, Discipleship, Enlightenment, Reality. The Upadesa Sahasri is cited in two parts, verse and prose. The Gita and Gaudapada's Karika commentaries and the Vivekachudamani are cited separately. The author flags the attributed works when he leans on them.
- Ibn Arabi. Chittick's Sufi Path of Knowledge (cited as Path) and Self-Disclosure of God; Austin's Bezels of Wisdom; Burckhardt's French Sagesse des Prophètes (cited as Sagesse); Valsan's French translations of short treatises on extinction, retreat and the Name, from Etudes Traditionnelles; Morris on the spiritual ascension; Chodkiewicz's Seal of the Saints and edited Illuminations; Addas's Quest for the Red Sulphur; Nicholson's Tarjuman al-Ashwaq. Where only French exists the author translates, checking the Arabic.
- Eckhart. Walshe's three-volume German sermons and treatises, cited by volume and page; C. de B. Evans for some passages; the Bull of 1329 for the condemned theses.
Notes worth keeping
Creed as bond. The Arabic 'aqidah, creed, comes from a root meaning to bind. Ibn Arabi's warning against being bound by a belief plays on this.
Being and finding. The root of wujud gives wijdan (finding) and wajd (ecstasy). The note links this triad to Sat-Chit-Ananda.
Eckhart and Shankara on the lower and higher. At the fireside passage a note recalls Shankara's rule: the lower may be treated as the higher, never the reverse.
Ramakrishna and the sword. At Eckhart's call to leave all images, a note cites Ramakrishna's account of cutting through the form of Kali with the sword of discrimination to reach the formless.
Known by not knowing. At "To him who knows nothing, it appears and reveals itself", a note cites the Upanishadic teaching that the Self is known by one who knows it not.
Verse numbers. The book prints the verse "Let him not associate (any) one with his Lord's worship" as 18:119 and the verse on creation not being play as 21:116.
Davies on the nuns. On Eckhart's refusal of petition, a note cites Oliver Davies: the nuns he addressed lived a piety dominated by petitionary prayer. The context explains the hyperbole.
Katz on ineffability. A note records Katz's view that ineffability is simply extraordinary language, and the author's reply that it marks the limit of the individual mind.
Eckhart's submission. A note observes that Eckhart submitted his case to the Pope and so cannot be called a wilful heretic, and cites Davies's contrast with Margaret Porete, burnt in 1310.
Schuon. The book is dedicated to him, and the notes refer to The Transcendent Unity of Religions as the frame for the conclusion of Chapter 4.
Biographies and further reading
The Introduction directs readers to three lives: Swami Tapasyananda's version of Madhava's Sankara dig-vijaya; Claude Addas, Quest for the Red Sulphur; and Oliver Davies, Meister Eckhart: Mystical Theologian. The Appendix engages Katz's edited volumes, Forman's The Problem of Pure Consciousness and Meister Eckhart: The Mystic as Theologian, Stace's Mysticism and Philosophy, Zaehner's Mysticism: Sacred and Profane, Smart's essays, Staal's Exploring Mysticism and Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy.
10. Synthesis
What should a reader carry away from three hundred pages on three sages?
Key takeaways
- The summit is one. Shankara, Ibn Arabi and Eckhart describe the same transcendent realization from three starting points.
- Unity is absolute only at the Absolute. Below the summit, religions and their mystics really differ.
- Realization means making real. It is a change in what one is, not a change of opinion.
- There is a level beyond the personal God: nirguna Brahman, the Essence, the Godhead.
- Beyond-Being is fullness, not emptiness. It is Being without the limit of relation.
- All three are apophatic. Negation clears false identification; it does not deny reality.
- Two perspectives dissolve most paradoxes. Ask whether a sentence speaks from the absolute or the relative viewpoint.
- The world is real as the Real and unreal as other. Rope and snake; shadow and its caster; creatures and pure nothing.
- Identity is non-reciprocal. The drop is the ocean; the ocean is not the drop.
- The individual is never liberated. Only the Self knows the Self.
- Experience is the wrong category. At the summit there is no separate subject to have one.
- Bliss is to be passed by on the way and found at the end in an unconditioned form.
- Grace is required, and it comes through the personal God. Faith and devotion therefore last.
- Virtue is a form of knowledge. Pride blinds the intellect.
- Doctrine is fruit as well as ladder. Ibn Arabi's opening came before his teaching.
- Rites differ in role, not in principle. Shankara's renunciation and the others' observance answer different contexts.
- Poverty and freedom are two views of one realization: the individual's and the content's.
- The realized sage returns. He acts without self-interest and sees God in all things.
- Suffering touches the outer man, not the ground. Eckhart's hinge, Shankara's ear-rings.
- All revealed religions are lights. One may outshine another without extinguishing it.
- Surpass religion; never bypass it. Going round the forms ends in pretension.
- Contextualism describes the individual well and the summit badly.
- Phenomenal similarity is not spiritual identity. Empty awareness is not the plenitude of the Absolute.
The argument step by step
- Three sages of the highest rank, from three religions, are read in their own terms.
- Each teaches an Absolute beyond Being, approached by negation.
- Each teaches that the inmost of the soul is identical with the Absolute, and that the identity is non-reciprocal.
- Each requires virtue, faith and grace, and keeps devotion after realization.
- Their differences concern rites, methods, prayer, emphasis and the status of the world.
- Each of these differences can be explained by context, viewpoint or emphasis.
- The Absolute can only be one.
- Therefore what they realize is one, though their paths are many.
- Modern theories that deny this do so by assuming that the individual and his context cannot be transcended, which is the very point at issue.
Five misreadings to avoid
- All religions are the same. The author denies this. Unity is absolute only at the Absolute.
- Religion can be left behind. The Epilogue's whole point is the opposite: surpass, never bypass.
- The summit is an ecstatic experience. All three sages pass by bliss as a state, and the author rejects the language of experience at the summit.
- The mystic becomes God. The individual never becomes God; the identity runs only from the Absolute to the soul.
- Shankara denies the world. He denies it as other than Brahman, not as Brahman appearing.
Frameworks table
| Framework | Source | What it does | Use it to |
|---|---|---|---|
| Absolute vs relative perspective | Shankara (paramarthika, vyavaharika) | Assigns every statement a viewpoint | Resolve apparent contradictions |
| False attribution, then denial | Shankara (adhyaropa-apavada) | Teaching by provisional statements later withdrawn | Design staged explanations |
| Double negation | Shankara, Eckhart | Denies both the thing and its opposite | Avoid replacing one limit with another |
| Limiting adjunct (upadhi) | Shankara | Explains apparent qualities by proximity | Separate a thing from what colours it |
| Level vs Essence | Ibn Arabi | God-in-relation vs God-in-Himself | Distinguish function from nature |
| Essential vs accidental perfection | Ibn Arabi | Ranks only what can be ranked | Avoid false hierarchies |
| Station vs state | Ibn Arabi | Earned and fixed vs given and passing | Tell lasting change from peak moments |
| Necessary vs accidental Word | Ibn Arabi | Separates the core of a law from its occasions | Read rules for their purpose |
| Sun and stars | Ibn Arabi | Supersession without annulment | Think about succession of systems |
| God vs Godhead | Eckhart | Working God vs silent ground | Distinguish activity from source |
| Merchants, doves, detachment | Eckhart | A scale of motive | Diagnose self-interest in good work |
| Door and hinge | Eckhart | Outer movement, inner stillness | Hold steady under pressure |
| Surpass, not bypass | Shah-Kazemi | Transcend forms by going through them | Judge shortcuts |
| Phenomenal vs supra-phenomenal | Shah-Kazemi | Similar appearance, different reality | Avoid matching on surface features |
A closer look
Honesty about difference. The author names the real differences (rites, prayer, creation) rather than hiding them.
A clear structure. Doctrine, ascent, return: the same three questions throughout make comparison possible.
Correction of interpreters. The challenge to Corbin and Izutsu is argued from Ibn Arabi's own texts.
A sharp Appendix. The critique of Katz exposes a hidden a priori, and the reply to Forman draws a useful line between empty awareness and fullness.
Translations. The comparisons rest on English versions. Identical English words can hide different originals.
Selection. Each sage is read for transcendence. Ibn Arabi's breadth is set aside by design; Eckhart's Latin works are barely used.
Harmonizing. Each difference is softened by context or viewpoint. A sceptic may ask whether any evidence could count against the thesis.
Verifiability. The claim that the summit is one cannot be checked from outside it. The author accepts this and argues that the sages' intentions justify taking their claims at face value.
Contemporary targets. The Epilogue's warnings about pseudo-spirituality are strong but name no examples.
On balance, the book succeeds as a demonstration that the three sages use the same structure of thought: an Absolute beyond Being, an inward path, a non-reciprocal identity, grace, and a humble return. Whether that structure reflects a single reality, as the author holds, is a question the reader must answer from his own standpoint.
Who's Who
Ibn Arabi. Andalusian Sufi, al-Shaykh al-Akbar; author of the Futuhat and Fusus.
Meister Eckhart. German Dominican preacher; some theses condemned by a papal Bull of 1329.
Reza Shah-Kazemi. The author; the book grows from his thesis at Kent, 1994.
Frithjof Schuon. Dedicatee; author of The Transcendent Unity of Religions.
Martin Lings. Read the text; translator of the Abu Bakr saying; biographer of Shaykh al-'Alawi.
Peter Moore. Doctoral supervisor.
Ghazi bin Mohammed. Gave assistance, 1991-1993.
Antony Alston. Translator of Shankara, consulted by the author.
Suresvara. Direct disciple of Shankara, in whose work Sat-Chit-Ananda appears.
Gaudapada. Author of the Karika on the Mandukya Upanishad, commented on by Shankara.
Ramakrishna. Hindu saint; the salt doll and the sword of discrimination.
Junayd. Early Sufi; water takes the colour of the cup.
Abu Yazid al-Bistami. Sufi of the ecstatic sayings.
al-Hallaj, Uways. Figures in Ibn Arabi's dialogue on servanthood.
Abu Bakr. First caliph; "the truthful".
Ibn Rushd. Philosopher who met the young Ibn Arabi.
al-Qashani (Kashani). Commentator on Ibn Arabi.
Shaykh al-'Alawi. Twentieth-century Sufi master.
Augustine, St Paul, Albertus Magnus. Authorities cited by Eckhart.
Margaret Porete. Burnt as a heretic in 1310.
Henry Corbin, Toshihiko Izutsu. Interpreters of Ibn Arabi; challenged on the vision of God.
William Chittick, Michel Chodkiewicz, Claude Addas, Titus Burckhardt, Michel Valsan. Scholars and translators of Ibn Arabi.
M. O'C. Walshe, C. de B. Evans, Oliver Davies. Translators and scholars of Eckhart.
Steven Katz, Robert Forman, W.T. Stace, R.C. Zaehner, Ninian Smart, Fritz Staal, Aldous Huxley. Theorists of mysticism criticized in the Appendix.
Rudolf Otto, D.T. Suzuki. Comparativists whose method the author does not follow.
The book prints few dates. Apart from those above, none is given here.
A closing reflection
The book's lasting contribution may be less its conclusion than its method. By putting the same three questions to each sage (what is the Absolute, how does one rise to it, how does one live after) it lets the reader see structure beneath vocabulary. Even a reader who doubts that the three reached the same summit will find it hard to deny that they describe the same kind of path: inward, apophatic, dependent on virtue and grace, and ending in a humble return.
Its second contribution is a warning. The Epilogue argues that the highest teaching, misused, produces the worst errors. To talk about the Absolute while despising religion, virtue and the personal God is not to surpass them but to fall below them. The three sages, for all their daring, lived as a monk, a Sufi under the Law and a Dominican friar. The author asks us to take that seriously.
Discussion questions
- Is the author's conclusion an empirical claim, a theological one, or both? What would count as evidence against it?
- Does the distinction between absolute and relative perspectives resolve contradictions, or only relocate them?
- Is Ibn Arabi's "religion of Love" compatible with his insistence on the Law?
- How far does context explain Eckhart's refusal of petitionary prayer?
- Is Katz's contextualism defeated by the argument that the summit transcends the individual, or does that argument assume what it needs to prove?
- Where in your own work do you see the difference between surpassing and bypassing?
Glossary
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| adhyaropa-apavada (S) | False attribution followed by denial; Shankara's teaching method |
| adhyatma-yoga (S) | Interior yoga of withdrawal and dissolution taught by Shankara |
| advaita (S) | Non-duality |
| afrad (A) | The "solitary ones", hidden saints |
| ahadiyyah (A) | Exclusive Oneness of the One |
| ajati (S) | Non-origination: nothing has ever really been created |
| anubhava (S) | Immediate realization |
| 'aqidah (A) | Creed; from a root meaning to bind |
| a'yan thabitah (A) | Immutable entities: archetypes of things in God's knowledge |
| baqa' (A) | Subsistence after extinction |
| barzakh (A) | Isthmus; that which joins and separates two things |
| buddhi (S) | Intellect; first receiver of the Self's reflection |
| Durchbruch (G) | Breakthrough beyond God into the Godhead |
| dhikr (A) | Invocation, remembrance of God |
| dhyana (S) | Meditation as one-pointed focusing on the source of consciousness |
| fana' (A) | Extinction of the individual in God |
| faqr (A) | Spiritual poverty |
| fath (A) | Opening; sudden spiritual illumination |
| Geburt (G) | The Birth of the Word in the soul |
| gezucket (G) | Rapture; rendered "enstasis" by the author |
| Godhead (Gottheit) | For Eckhart, the divine ground beyond the Persons |
| hal (A) | A spiritual state: given and passing |
| al-Haqq (A) | The Real, the Truth |
| Hiranyagarbha (S) | The cosmic intellect; penultimate stage of dissolution |
| Isvara (S) | The personal Lord; saguna Brahman |
| jivan-mukta (S) | One liberated while living |
| khalwah / jalwah (A) | Spiritual retreat / return into manifestation |
| kosa (S) | Sheath; five layers covering the Self |
| krama-mukti (S) | Liberation by stages after death |
| malamiyyah (A) | "People of blame": saints who hide their sanctity |
| maqam (A) | Spiritual station: earned and fixed |
| al-martabah (A) | The Level; God as Divinity in relation to the world |
| Maya (S) | The power by which the One appears as many |
| moksa (S) | Liberation |
| naskh (A) | Abrogation; read by Ibn Arabi as supersession |
| neti, neti (S) | "Not thus, not thus" |
| nirguna / saguna (S) | Without qualities / with qualities |
| nitya-siddha (S) | Eternally accomplished |
| paramarthika / vyavaharika (S) | Absolute / relative standpoint |
| prarabdha karma (S) | Karma already in motion, which keeps the body alive after liberation |
| qalb (A) | Heart; from a root meaning to turn |
| samadhi (S) | Deep absorption; with seeds (sambija) or without (nirvikalpa) |
| Sat-Chit-Ananda (S) | Being-Consciousness-Bliss |
| sannyasin (S) | Renunciate monk |
| tadatmya (S) | Non-reciprocal identity |
| tajalli (A) | Theophany, divine self-disclosure |
| tanzih / tashbih (A) | Incomparability / similarity of God |
| Turiya (S) | The "Fourth": the Self beyond waking, dream and sleep |
| 'ubudah / 'ubudiyyah (A) | Servitude / servanthood; the first is higher |
| upadhi (S) | Limiting adjunct |
| upaya (S) | Saving stratagem |
| al-uluhiyyah (A) | Divinity |
| walayah, wali (A) | Sainthood, saint ("friend") |
| wujud (A) | Being; also finding |
About this book
Paths to Transcendence: According to Shankara, Ibn Arabi and Meister Eckhart by Reza Shah-Kazemi, 2006. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions