(transcribed by Clifford Stetner)
103
…one could hard get a greater contrast than Theravada Buddhism and medieval Christianity…
104
…I hold that there are genuine phenomenological comparisons to be made cross-culturally, especially in relation to mystical experience.
…the whole atmosphere of the Visuddhimagga (Path of Purification) differs greatly from that of the English Cloud of Unknowing.
…the Path is full of rather detailed instructions on the nitty-gritty of contemplative practices, while the Cloud is more poetic and allusive.
The Path urges recollection, for instance, of the Buddha an the various epithets applied to him, such as “accomplished,” “fully enlightened,” “blessed,” and so on.
106
The fact that the Cloud arose in a culture where great importance was attached to the monastic life helps to close the gap between Sri Lanka and medieval England. There is, of course, a usage that might have caused problems for Buddhaghosa: the identification of the highest virtues with love. the usual story is that for Buddhism the central virtue is compassion, or karuna. This has a different flavor form that of agape, or reverential love of other beings. But the proper comparison would be with the four brahmaviharas, which could cover both love and justice in the Christian tradition.
…the Buddhist account is more detailed and analytical, and is not negatively concerned with the concept of sin, which figures prominently in the language of the Cloud…
…Buddhaghosa would have had no trouble in understanding what was sometimes strange and even shocking to English commentators—the idea of the “cloud of forgetting.”
107
…they must suppress even the bare consciousness of self. This doubtless would remind Buddhaghosa of the higher jhanas, in which the adept passes beyond the contemplation of boundless consciousness and ascends to the realms of nothingness and neither-perception-nor-nonperception…
108
…perfect sorrow arises form the recognition that the person is. And yet “in all this sorrow he desireth not to un-be: for that were the devil’s madness and despite to God” (chap. 44). Buddhaghosa would not worry too much about the devil, or Mara, but he doubtless would recognize here a parallel with the middle path. The adept desires neither to be nor to un-be. He hopes to lose consciousness of the self, but he does not wish for annihilation.
110
…the purification of consciousness (Buddhist) is equivalent to the attainment of nakedness of being (the Cloud).
…the Cloud was written within a medieval cultural context in which scholastic philosophy was the norm, and with it came the whole substance-metaphysics of Aristotle as modified somewhat by the negative theology of Dionysius the Areopagite.
111
…the love of God is the love of X, because all the particularities of the Christian myth and doctrine fall away in the cloud of forgetting. So paradoxically, it is God considered without those attributes that constitute personhood for us, which is the “object:” of perfect love.
112
…while Buddhaghosa would have rejected the contextual language of the Cloud, he would have made sense of the notions of naked intent and pure or perfect love.
113
…Buddhaghosa would, then, have continually wondered how it was that the author of the Cloud had to import such alien ideas as God and Christ into his description of the path that led into the cloud.
115
…there is the vision of nirvana, the realization of the unborn condition. This notion was put into the language of emptiness in the Mahayana tradition. There is considerable testimony in the mystical literature that the highest state is without distinction of subject and object, or is nondual (advaya). The description that the Cloud gives of the cloud itself and the highest experience is consistent with there occurring a nondual experience, which is naturally enough seen ex post facto as being oned with God.
117
…the account of a timeless light is within the bounds of metaphors used in the Buddhist tradition.
…the cloud of unknowing itself. First, from Buddhaghosa’s viewpoint, it can be the same “place” as nirvana…
I think Buddhaghosa would have found the Cloud’s invitation to the mystical path both intelligible and attractive, but the language of God highly indigestible.
119
…the “Epistle of Privy Counsel” makes interesting reading in this connection. Bare being differs not a whit form bare nonbeing, save that it signals the commitment to a certain style of ontology.
…Buddhaghosa could have appreciated the negativeness, for that also characterizes emptiness (sunyata) and nirvana. But could he have agreed that the other terms that the author of the Cloud draws forth form the ultimate do so derive? Such terms as “Strength,” “Almighty,” and “All-witting” (i.e., “Omniscient”) simply cannot sensibly be predicated of nirvana.
…in the higher echelons of the process of jhana he looks for emptier and emptier characterizations of the ineffable state that the adept reaches. This is why for him the via negativa could prove to be congenial. Of course, Theravadin ontology is event-based, not thing-based.
120
…the author of the Cloud approaches the ultimate from a certain angle. He comes form the direction of Christian theism. He projects into the formless “is” the concepts of Lordship and Omniscience and what have you, and then miraculously finds these terms encapsulated in the “is” and so easily to be drawn forth.
…Theravada is not ontological absolutism or a kind of theism; there is not in it a great Being out there. It differs form all Vedantas and all Western theologies—indeed, form all theologies.
I. As Smart says, Buddhaghosa would recognize the metaphysics of the Cloud but would differ with its theism.
II. The theism of the Cloud owes more to the medieval English writer than to Dionysius. Although Denis passes himself of as one of the apostles, hid divinity minimizes theism.
III. Denis represents a common root of Judeo-Christian metaphysics and Buddhist metaphysics, or an early Western branch of the common root.
IV. The difference between Buddhist and Dionysian ideas of theism are related to different orientation toward language and toward providential history.
The accommodation of mythology to metaphysics through allegory as in Moses = historical providentialism. It represents a stage in the development of human intellect which corresponds to the abstraction of Jewish mythology from the Jews. Allegory represents a second order of linguistic function in which narrative (semantic?) rather than syntactic elements become signifiers.