The Human Condition

Adam and Eve in Genesis and later exegesis

Assignment

Study Genesis 2-3.

Also read Coursepack reading #1.  (The Coursepack is for sale in the Crimson and Cream copy shop downstairs in the Union.)  Reading #1 consists of two texts: 

• Genesis Rabbah, 148-158, 172-179.
• Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, 91-101.

As you mark up the text and make notes for yourself to draw on in class, focus on these questions:

• Are humans still "very good," as Genesis 1 declared, or are they now a source of evil?
• Is the condition of men different than that of women?
• Are there any hints yet about what salvation from "the human condition" might look like?

We need to keep distinct the views of each text on these questions, because each text may give a somewhat different answer.

Background reading (essential for honors students):  Coward, Scripture in the World Religions, 10-26.

Notes from class

Today we finally made some real headway on our first-level project of figuring out how different scriptures view the human condition and salvation from it.  We tackled four main questions:

• Three kinds of knowledge are recognized by all our texts:
  • Practical knowledge (the names of things, agricultural practices).  Adam had this before his disobedience.
  • Moral knowledge - what one should do, or law.  I initially assumed this kind of knowledge resulted from eating the fruit, and thus was part of the human problem, not part of its solution.  But we noticed that Adam and Eve had some moral knowledge before their disobedience, and Genesis Rabbah (GR) presents the moral knowledge of the Torah as part of the solution to the human problem.  Recall too that Proverbs 8 presented Wisdom (which includes moral knowledge) as the key to some kind of salvation.  We contrasted this with a common Chritian view, which we will encounter soon in our Christian texts, that law is a cause of sin and death rather than a means to salvation from sin and death.
  • Knowledge of consequences - realizing what one has done.  This, rather than moral knowledge or law, is the kind of knowledge that Genesis (G) and GR clearly say resulted from eating the fruit. 
• The nature of the human problem is not clearly defined by our texts; it seems to involve at least three elements:
  • Alienation from God
    • We debated whether alienation from God is really the Rabbis' primary concern, or whether that is a Christian notion we are reading into the text.  We noted that G and GR speak of expulsion from the garden rather than from God's presence per se.
    • But G does show Adam and Eve in close contact with God before they are expelled from the garden, and this does make it sound like they were separated from God.
    • GR uses language that much more clearly indicates some kind of alienation from God - especially the metaphor of divorce, and God's removal of his Shekinah (glory, presence) from earth.
  • Death
    • Some of us thought death rather than alienation was the main result of disobedience.
    • G and GR certainly do present death as at least part of the result of disobedience.
  • Hardship
    • Genesis and Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer (PRE) mention toil and pain, but this is not emphasized by GR.
  • So we are still not entirely clear on what salvation will look like:  it may mean some kind of salvation from death, or some kind of reconciliation to God, or some combination of the two.  It may mean different things to different Rabbis.
• The means to salvation from the human problem is also hazy in our texts.
  • We did not identify any clear theory of salvation in G.
  • GR sometimes clearly indicates that moral knowledge - namely the revelation of the Torah - is key to salvation.
  • But GR also indicates that obedience - following that moral knowledge - is key to salvation.
  • But then GR is ambivalent about whether humans are actually able to attain salvation through obedience.  So we ran into a fourth question:
• Is salvation even possible?  GR quotes Rabbis on both sides of this question:
  •   Some Rabbis take a pessimistic view:
    • The Israelites all sin like Adam, and like him they are under Satan's rule.
    • Alienation from God is permanent, like an irrevocable divorce.
    • Adam's expulsion is for this life and the next.
  • Some Rabbis take an optimistic view:
    • Some of Adam's children are able to obey where he failed.
    • Some men are righteous enough to bring God's Shekinah back to earth.
    • Alienation from God is like a revocable divorce.
    • Adam's expulsion is for this life only.
    • The decree against Adam, and his descendents being trampled in the grave by the Angel of Death, will eventually come to an end.

So the Rabbis have competing theories of salvation:  some think it's possible because humans can obey the law they are given, while others think a full return to the pre-disobedience state is impossible, perhaps because humans cannot actually obey the law they are given.  There is disagreement, then, over whether the Torah can actually enable a full solution to the human problem (whether that be death or alienation from God).

The fact that our discussion today ended up taking the form of an argument was, I think, quite productive.  It reflects our different backgrounds:  some of us tend to read our texts through the lens of Christian concepts of sin and salvation, whereas others have been taught that we must avoid doing that at all costs, and consequently are very reluctant to admit interpretations that sound in any way Christian.  We must keep challenging each other, not to win each other over to our own perspectives, but to help each other become more aware of our interpretive lenses, and to help all of us really pay attention to the details of our texts.

Paul and Calvin on Adam and sin

Assignment

Read the Apostle Paul's letter to the Romans, chapters 1-7, in the New Testament.

Read John Calvin's commentary on Romans 5:12-14 (Coursepack reading #2, pages 199-205).

Focus your attention and make notes on how Paul presents human sinfulness, and on how Calvin interprets human sinfulness, specifically his doctrine of original sin.  Do Paul's and Calvin's interpretations of Adam's sin fit with the story of that sin in Genesis 3?

Background reading (essential for honors students):  Coward, Scripture in the World Religions, 50-71.

Notes from class

Today we constructed pretty nuanced interpretations of Paul and Calvin's views of the human condition, and some elements of their views of salvation, without (I think) reading too much of our prior knowledge into the texts:

• Paul
  • The human condition
    • We tried three theories about the nature of the sin that Paul says results in death:
    1. Sinful acts.  This is supported by the emphasis on sinful acts in Rom 1-2.
    2. An inability to do the good humans know they should do.  This is stated in Rom 7.
    3. The guilt of Adam's sin:  humans are under the curse of death not because of their own sin, but because of Adam's sin.  Rom 5:15 supports this, but 5:16 and other passages insist all humans have their own sins.
  • We debated what Paul means when he says that where there is no law sin is dead.
    • He can't mean sin doesn't exist in the absence of law, because he says it existed between Adam and Moses. 
    • He can't simply mean that sin isn't counted as sin in the absence of law, because he says the curse of death has dominion over those between Adam and Moses, so they are being judged for sin.
    • He affirms that sin did not "spring to life" in him before the law came.  The law seems to be good for his mind, which delights in it, but bad for his flesh, which takes the law as an occasion for sin.
    • This whole discussion seems to be rendered moot by his statement in Rom 2 that even those not under the law have the law written on their hearts.  So Paul is not saying anyone is ever really without law; perhaps he is just saying that sin would not exist or be counted or spring to life if people were without the law.
• Salvation
  • Paul talks about two human natures:  the sinful pre-salvation nature (the flesh), which does not will the good, and the post-salvation nature which does will the good, but is still (at least for now) in conflict with the pre-salvation nature.
  • How does one move from one nature to the next?  In other words, how is one saved?
  • Law, though good, can never save.  People would be saved for doing good, but in fact no one ever will be declared righteous by fulfilling the law.  The law makes good and evil known, but it also prompts the flesh to do evil, so it is incapable of saving people.
  • Rather, Paul says people move from one nature to the next by being identified with or assimilated to Christ, so that they share Christ's death and resurrection, which make them dead to sin and thus free from sin, and alive to Christ and slaves to righteousness.  But that transformation seems to be still incomplete, since he says his new nature is still in conflict with his old nature, and he says humans "will" share in Christ's resurrection.
  • Paul gives lots of other descriptions of what saves people:  obeying the law (in principle, though it won't ever happen), faith, grace, free gift of righteousness, sacrifice of atonement, etc.  But we didn't get to all these.
• Calvin
• The human condition
  • Calvin opts for the second of Paul's three possible views of sin:
    • He rejects 3:  Humans are NOT simply held guilty for Adam's sin; they are themselves sinful.
    • He rejects 1:  The sin they have because of Adam is not their sinful acts.
    • He develops 2 into a doctrine of "original sin," by which he means a corruption of their nature that they inherit from Adam.  That corruption makes human nature evil in some sense, but we couldn't tell exactly what Calvin meant by that, except that it involves a loss of God's likeness.  That lost likeness included righteous.  Its loss must entail an incapacity to choose the good, or a lack of will to do the good, since Calvin insists humans cannot be saved by simply following the law or Christ's example.
  • Humans have moral knowledge, but they deliberately blind themselves to it and refuse to recognize that they are doing evil.  This might be a part of what Calvin means by the corruption of human nature, but it is not all he means, because if it were all he meant, then the law, which raises awareness of evil, would be sufficient to solve the problem of original sin.
  • We suspect that elsewhere Calvin might share Paul's view that there is a second, transformed (regenerated) nature that humans obtain through "salvation," and which is able to will the good; but that is not in our text.
• Salvation
  • Law is helpful in that it corrects humans' refusal to recognize their own sin, but it does not save humans, because they are by nature incapable of following it.
  • Hence Christ is NOT just an example to follow (i.e. a source of moral knowledge), just as Adam's sin does not make humans sinful simply because they imitate him.
  • Rather, Christ's righteousness somehow causes human salvation from the penalty (death) of their original sin.  Since Calvin says Adam's sin causes human original sin "genetically," perhaps he would also say that Christ's righteousness cause human righteousness genetically - by their being adopted or identified with him, just as Paul says they are identified with him in his death and resurrection?
• So Calvin seems to have focused on just a few of the many views of sin and human nature that we found in Paul, and he is trying to pin down exactly what Paul is saying.  But we would have to read a lot more of Calvin to discover all that he thinks Paul is saying in Romans 1-7.

Adam in the Qur'an and Ibn Kathir's commentary

Assignment

Study Q 2:28-39 (i.e. the Qur'an , chapter 2, verses 28-39), as well as Q 7:10-27, Q 7:172-173, and Q 20:115-127.

Then read coursepack reading #3:  Ibn Kathir's Commentary (tafsir), 4:200-204 (on Q 7:172), and 6:400-408 (on Q 20:115-127). 

As you read, think about three things:

• How the Qur'an and Ibn Kathir regard human nature.  Is it prone to evil?
• What these views imply about the nature and means of "salvation."
• How and why tafsir transforms the text of the Qur'an.

Background reading (essential for honors students):  Coward, Scripture in the World Religions, 94-101.

Notes from class

Our major conclusion today was that from the way the Qur'an tells Adam's story, it appears his sin did not cast humanity into any dire situation from which it needs to be rescued.  Humans were cast of some former "state," but in fact their condition did not change very significantly at all, in several respects: 

• Death: 
  • Q seems to presume humans were mortal all along, and remain so, but death is not the problem, because all will be resurrected and judged.  The real problem is whether one will then receive eternal reward or punishment.
  • This is in stark contrast to Genesis, Genesis Rabbah, and Romans, all of which viewed death as a major consequence of Adam's sin.
• Alienation?
  • Humans are expelled from the garden to earth, but this seems to involve mainly a change in location.
  • There is no indication that they were cut off from God; quite the opposite, God "draws them near" and forgives them (relents towards them).
  • This is in contrast to the Rabbis and Paul, who use the language of relational alienation from God.
• Hardship: 
  • Q presents the garden as a place of bliss, but says the earth too will provide a decent dwelling and livelihood.
  • Q speaks of a life of hardship only for those who reject God's guidance.
  • (Ibn Kathir (IK) psychologizes Q a bit here, speaking of both inner and outer bliss and hardship.)
  • This is in stark contrast to Genesis, which listed numerous hardships as results of sin.
• Nakedness:
  • As in Genesis, sin causes awareness of nakedness, but God himself provides clothing, so nakedness itself does not remain a major problem.
  • Humans are capable of piety or God-consciousness, which is the best clothing.
• Moral knowledge:
  • There is no mention of a "tree of the knowledge of good and evil," or of humans "becoming like one of us, knowing good and evil," as in Genesis.  The tree in Q is just a tree, or at most a tree of life that doesn't work.  (IK makes it the tree of life.)
  • Instead, humans have the same moral knowledge all along.  They receive both moral guidance from God and temptation from Iblis (=Satan), both before and after Adam's sin.
• Human nature:
  • Q7:132 says humans all primordially recognize God's lordship over them.  (IK elaborates this into a theory that humans are all Muslims by nature and that it is only their environment - their parents and the temptations of Satan - that lead them astray.)
  • This sound human nature (called the fitra) is not changed when Adam sins.  On the contrary, Q insists humans can still choose to obey God and achieve piety / God-consciousness.
  • The only flaw Q ascribes to human nature is forgetfulness, which is a problem (but not itself a sin) both before and after Adam's sin.  (IK makes forgetfulness seem like more of a sin.)
  • This is in contrast to Paul's notion of the flesh and Calvin's doctrine of original sin.  Some Rabbis, however, seemed to agree that humans could still be righteous enough to bring God's Shekinah back to earth.
• Adam's sin, then, did not cast humans into any new or dire situation from which they need rescuing.  It was just the first illustration of the same choice that humans still face today.  Q explicitly compares humans' present choice to that of Adam, and urges them not to choose as Adam did.

This has important implications for what salvation will look like in the Qur'an:

• Humans don't need reconciliation because they are not cut off from God.
• What humans do need is guidance and reminders, to counter their forgetfulness and the temptations of Satan.  The Qur'an is that guidance and reminder. 
• Humans are perfectly capable of following that guidance and thus earning eternal reward.
• This is in stark contrast to Paul (and most Christians), who think humans need someone outside of themselves to save them from death and reconcile them to God (a new Adam to reverse the effects of Adam's sin - something completely unnecessary according to Q).  This role is filled by Christ.  The closest parallel to Christ for Muslims is not Muhammad but the Qur'an, which like Christ is regarded as eternal and salvific.
• The very term salvation connotes rescue, and so seems more appropriate to Paul and Christians than to the Qur'an and Muslims.  What Q's presentation of the human condition calls for is not salvation but help in making a choice. 
• It therefore seems that Paul and Q (and perhaps Christianity and Islam) are trying solve completely different problems, or answer completely different questions.  What does this do to our project of seeking to "understand humanity in general"?  Can we do that if religions and texts don't agree on what humans are or what their basic situation is?

We did not get very far today in analyzing what IK's commentary does to the text of Q.

• We did note that IK makes forgetfulness more serious, and thus blames Adam a bit more for his sin, and develops more fully the theory of humans' Muslim nature (fitra). 
• More imporant was our observation that IK adds a psychological dimension to the Qur'an's descriptions of bliss and hardship.  This takes Q to a new level.
• In fact, we tried psychologizing Q as well.  One suggestion was to read this story as a metaphor for the psychological battle that takes place within all humans, with Satan representing one's own lower nature (something like what Paul called the flesh).
• IK did not go that far.  He psychologized bliss and hardship, but he treated the whole story literally, as a real event that illustrates a moral lesson.  He did not treat it as a grand metaphor for inner psychological processes.
• But we should keep trying different ways of reading our texts.  Someone pointed out after class that Hindu and Buddhist texts are often read at multiple levels:  what is true of the macrocosm (the universe or a nation) is true of the microcosm (especially the inner realm of psychology).  Why not try this kind of reading with other religions' texts, and see whether it yields any new insights into those texts?

Karma and rebirth in Hindu texts

Assignment

From the Brahmanas:  Read Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism, pp. 10-13 (Shatapatha Brahmana 2.2.4.1-8 and 10.4.3.1-10 and 1.6.3.35-7).

From the Upanishads:  Read Textual Sources pp. 34-37 (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.7, Shvetashvatara Upanishad 4.1-10, Chandogya Upanishad 5.3-10).

From the Puranas:  Read Textual Sources pp. 116-121 (from the Markandeya Purana).

Can all these texts be understood as presenting a single coherent Hindu picture of the human situation, death, and rebirth?  Or is there a shift in thinking from the earlier texts to the later texts?  (Look at the Timeline to get a sense of the relative chronology of these texts.)

Background reading (essential for honors students):  Coward, Scripture in the World Religions, 122-128 .

Notes from class

Today we finally hit a wall trying to understand a text that was just too unfamiliar for us to make much sense of.  This is a key moment in the course:  we can't get discouraged by how little we understand; we need to keep patiently dissecting our texts one sentence at a time until we come up with some kind of interpretation, no matter how shaky that interpretation might seem.  That's how knowledge is created!  Some of you did very well today, proposing possible interpretations and then using specific clues in the texts to confirm or revise those interpretations.

We did manage to come up with an overall interpretation of our three excerpts from the Shatapatha Brahmana (SB):

• The basic human problem is repeated death:
  • Death is identified with time.
  • Death means being eaten.
  • Dying once - being separated from one's body - seems to be okay, because humans will come back to life.
  • But the problem is that once alive again, humans keep on dying again and again.  That cycle of rebirth and death is what SB wants to avoid.
• So the goal is to be reborn with "immortal life."
  • One part of SB seems to say that simply coming to life again is the goal, and we thought it might equate that rebirth with having progeny.
  • But another part of SB clearly said that being reborn only to die again is not the goal; salvation is only "immortal" rebirth.
  • Immortal rebirth seems to mean being reborn:
    • free from time
    • without a body
    • as an "eater of food" (like the gods) rather than as food for some other "eater" (like most humans)
• The means to immortal life is ritual knowledge and action
  • Knowing exactly how many bricks to use in building a fire altar, and then doing it right, gains immortality.
  • Knowing exactly when to fast, and then doing it at the right time, gains immortality.
  • So both the ritual and an understanding of the reasons for it are crucial.
  • But why does ritual + knowledge work?  SB was not explicit about this, but we came up with two main possibilities:
    • Ritual + knowledge works because it allows one to imitate the gods, and so become "eaters" just like them.  (Note that the gods are not intrinsically any different from humans, they too needed the right knowledge and ritual to become immortal.)
    • Ritual + knowledge works because it symbolizes a spiritual knowledge that liberates.  Sacrifice symbolically takes the universe, which exists in many "names and forms," and puts it back together into the One from which it originated.  If one understands this, one realizes that one's own self is actually one with the One, and to know that is to lose the illusion of individuality.  This is what the Upanishads teach, but we think it may also be what SB teaches, at least symbolically.

To my surprise, then, we found that SB actually seems to support the same view of the human condition, and possibly the same view of salvation, as the later texts we read (Upanishads and Puranas, which we did not have time to dissect):

• The Upanishads and Puranas clearly spell out the cycle of rebirth, and clearly say that salvation means escaping that cycle.  I originally thought that SB was concerned with how to overcome a single death, but we found pretty clear evidence that SB also is trying to avoid a cycle of deaths.
• The Upanishads clearly spell out the doctrine that salvation comes from realizing that one's self is identical to the One from which all things came through differentiation.  We think this idea could already be present in SB:  since proper ritual action "puts back together" the body of god, from which the world was created through division, SB may be saying in a veiled way that salvation comes from overcoming the illusion of a differentiated universe, and recognizing one's unity with the One.

This raised the first of several questions about how sacred texts and their commentaries function:

• Do commentaries really draw out ideas that are already latent in sacred texts, or do they project their ideas back onto the sacred texts?  Coward says that the Upanishads' idea of salvation was present in earlier Vedic texts, and was just brought out more clearly by the later commentary of the Upanishads.  But Coward is just saying what Hindus would say, and of course they say that their later interpretations are really what the texts meant all along!  In the same way, Rabbis insisted that whatever the Oral Torah said was really what the Written Torah had meant all along.  Every intepreter claims that his or her interpretation was already latent in the text.  How can we tell whether that is true?  Our conclusions today seem to support that view:  we found that the Upanishads' ideas about rebirth and salvation do seem to be supported, at least symbolically, by SB.  But I'm still suspicious that we, like the commentators, are just reading those ideas back into the text, and that the original authors of those texts may not have had those ideas at all.
• SB itself is a commentare on a still earlier text (the Rig Veda), and we noticed that its purpose seems to be to explain why the sacrifices for which the Rig Veda provides the hymns are effective.  It claims that for the sacrifices to be effective, one must understand the reasons for them that SB gives.
• That leads to our third point:  these texts seem designed to support the authority of the small group of Brahmins who transmitted them and performed the sacrifices.  They do this in several ways:
  • They claim that the knowledge passed down exclusively among Brahmins is the only way to gain salvation, or to gain the "power to rule."
  • They tell people to be nice to Brahmins if they don't want a terrible death and rebirth.
  • They may even offer salvation only to themselves:  only those who study these texts can become "eaters," while others remain food to be "eaten."  But we disputed this; some of us think that the sacrifices SB prescribes actually help maintain the universe for the benefit of all.
• If these texts are intended for and studied by only a small group, then we can't expect them to help us understand the majority of Hindu people we encounter.  So far our project of studying sacred texts comparatively in order to understand religious individuals is not looking very promising!

Karma and rebirth in early Buddhist texts

Assignment

From the Pali Canon, read:  Warren, Buddhism in Translations, 215-221 (two selections from the Anguttara-Nikaya, which is part of the Dharma Sutras).

From the Milindapanha, read:  Warren, Buddhism in Translations, 232-234.

From the works of Buddhagosa, read:  Warren, Buddhism in Translations, 179-182, 221-226.

Let's think about three things:

• Do these texts present one coherent picture of karma and rebirth, or several conflicting ones?
• Do any of their doctrines of karma and rebirth agree with any of our Hindu texts?
• Do these texts indicate how one can be saved from the cycle of karma and rebirth?

(As always, I encourage those of you who have not contributed regularly in class to email me a one-paragraph response to this question at least an hour before class.)

Background reading (essential for honors students):  Coward, Scripture in the World Religions, 151-156.

Notes from class

Despite some uncertainty about granaries and water glasses, I think we came up with a pretty coherent and (refreshingly) simple picture of how all our Buddhist texts view the human condition:

• A cycle of existence
  • As in our Hindu texts, death itself is not the problem; the problem is that one keeps being reborn.
  • In our Hindu texts the individual soul was continually reborn, but here there is no individual soul that is continuous from one existence to the next.  Yet somehow it is still one's own karma that keeps one coming back to existence; it was still Mogallana who had to keep dying a terrible death over and over again.
  • In our Hindu texts the goal was to be reborn in an immortal life, whereas here the goal is not to be reborn at all.
  • So here life itself is the problem to be escaped.
• Misery
  • Life itself is a problem because even happiness is really misery, as we would realize if we really thought about it.
• The cause of misery
  • The cause of the arising of existence (and hence life and misery) is karma.
  • Karma consists of thoughts that manifest themselves in bodily actions, words, and more thoughts.
  • The karma that manifests itself in bad deeds leads to miserable lives, deaths, or even "hell;" but even "good karma" - karma that expresses itself in meritorious deeds like charity - springs up again in the form of new existence and misery.
  • That is because all karma, even "good karma," arises from attachment (whether covetousness, hatred, or infatuation), which arises from ignorance.

This problem requires a certain kind of solution:

• NOT good deeds - they will just produce more karma.
• NOT sacrifices or even "ecstatic mediation."
• The only way to not produce more karma is to act without any attachment whatsoever.
• This requires knowledge, because when one knows that everything is impermanent and misery, one has no attachments.
• How can one achieve this knowledge?  The text mentioned certain practices such as control of the body, concentration, and living by certain precepts.  But we don't think those practices themselves produce salvation, because right actions and even meditation can themselves produce more karma.
• Rather, we think those practices set up certain conditions favorable to acquiring true knowledge and hence liberation:  they help one to minimize one's production of bad karma, so that one reaches a life in which one's prior karma can all be burned up within one lifetime (through the mere fact of suffering), and they help one become "unbounded" (conscious of one's non-individuality?).
• Under those favorable circumstances, one can act without attachment, and even the little bit of karma one still produces isn't enough to make one be reborn, so when one's karma is finally used up one ceases to be reborn.

We then took this (no doubt to simplistic) model of early Buddhist views of the human condition and salvation, and compared it with the other models (also doubtless far too simplistic) that we have developed this term, to form the following table, showing which texts emphasize which views of the human condition and salvation:

Remember, this is not a statement of what these texts would be found to teach if we did a careful analysis of each one in its entirety, and it is certainly not a statement of what Jews or Christians or Muslims or Hindus or Buddhists believe.  This is just a summary of what our collective process of interpretation has achieved after a few weeks of reading a few fragments of texts in isolation from their larger textual and religious contexts.  If that seems problematic, it is.  We still have a lot of thinking to do about what this process can and cannot achieve.  But remember - you signed up for this process, so let's do it!  Don't undermine it; contribute to it!  Then we can sit back and assess the value and limitations of what we have done.

The Lotus Sutra

Assignment

Read Coursepack reading #4, which consists of two texts:

• The Lotus Sutra, ch. 3 (from the translation by Leon Hurvitz, 49-64).  Focus on the parable of the burning house, on pages 58-64.  This is a major Mahayana sutra, originally written in Sanskrit and translated into Chinese several times beginning in the 3rd century C.E.
• Tao-sheng's Commentary on the Lotus Sutra, ch. 3 (from the translation of Young-ho Kim, 201-214).  Tao-sheng was an early Chinese Buddhist scholar who lived from about 360 to 434 C.E (see the timeline).

These are Mahayana Buddhist texts.  Do their views of the human condition agree with those of the early Buddhist texts we read for last class?  How about their views of salvation?

Notes from class

We assessed and adjusted our process of constructing knowledge through comparison of primary texts:

• We are discovering some fundamental differences between views of the human condition and salvation.  We can't be sure that individual religious people will agree with what we found in their scriptures, but at least we have some starting points to help us figure out why they might think the way they do.  Such knowledge would help us avoid talking past religious people - as when the Christian said the Buddhist would find the forgiveness he needs in Christianity, totally missing the fact that a Buddhist probably wouldn't think he needed forgiveness.
• Similarities between religions have been more elusive, but we can find some if we rise to a higher level of abstraction:  the texts are not all trying to solve the same problem, but they are all trying to solve kind of problem (even if it is sometimes a cosmic rather than specifically human problem), and they are all explaining some kind of purpose (whether for humans or the cosmos).  It would be nice if we could find some similarities are that are a bit more concrete - some doctrine or other that is common to all religions.
• Comparison has helped us see things in our texts that we might otherwise have missed - such as the absence of change in Adam and Eve's state in the Qur'an's account of their sin.
• The synopses that people come up with to describe any religion tend to gloss over differences and tensions between that religion's different texts.  So we can't expect Huston Smith's book "The Religions of Man" (now called "The World's Religions") to accurately represent all our texts.  But we're going to try reading it, as an experiment - to see whether the "background knowledge" that it provides about each religion will help us understand our texts, or will prove to be just one man's agenda-driven misrepresentation of the variety of texts that partly define each religion.

Comparing the parable of the burning house in the Lotus Sutra with the early Buddhist texts we read for last class at first suggested that the Lotus Sutra took a very different view of the human condition and salvation:

• The parable presents people as blissfully ignorant, not miserable as in the earlier texts.
• In the parable attachment to worldly "toys" is precisely the means used to save people, not the thing one must abandon to be saved.
• In the parable and elsewhere in the Lotus Sutra, the goal seems to be not extinction, but some kind of better life.

BUT when we looked at how the Lotus Sutra (and Tao-sheng's commentary on it) explain the parable, we found that they actually agreed with the early Buddhist texts on most points:

• People's bliss is illusory; they are really miserable but just don't know it.
• The several "toys" with which they are tempted are not worldly pleasures but various Buddhist teachings (dharmas) or paths to enlightenment, so the way to enlightenment is not attachment to worldly toys.
• The better life and higher bliss that people gain turns out to be a temporary (though extremely long) period of giving up extinction in order to lead others toward extinction.  (This is what a Boddhisattva does.)  So the Lotus Sutra still seeks a kind of extinction.

The main differences from the early Buddhist texts are:

• The extinction sought in the Lotus Sutra is not individual extinction, but the extinction of all, though a long period of non-extinction in which one acts as a Boddhisattva to lead others to the salvation.
• The teachings of earlier texts are recast as mere "expedient means" to get people to a higher realization.  This resolves the problem of the father's apparent lie.

This illustrates one interesting way to deal with a scripture that one wants to affirm, but that one disagrees with:

• Trump it by by affirming it:  affirm that it is true in some sense, but reframe it as a lesser degree of truth.
• A similar approach is taken by the Qur'an, which affirms the Torah and Gospel but redefines them on its own terms - as legitimate books of law which are superceded by the Qur'an.
• Another approach is simply to reinterpret the scripture you don't agree with, as the Upanishads did with the Vedic mantras, taking them as indicative of metaphysical knowledge rather than as rules for literal sacrifices.

Discussion of papers

Assignment

Your Midterm Essay is due today.  Please bring a hard copy to class.

In class we will share highlights from your essays, so please come prepared to describe in a few sentences one especially interesting conclusion or comparison from your paper.

Notes from class

From a handful of papers we gathered a rich set of ideas about the human condition and salvation.  Here I list just five recurring ones, which should prove to be useful to us going forward - abstract categories that we can use in comparing our texts:

• Knowledge
  • We have encountered many kinds of knowledge: 
    • moral:  knowing which actions are right and which are wrong
    • relational:  awareness of nakedness before someone, feeling guilty before someone, fearing someone.
    • ritual:  knowing how to perform a sacrifice
    • metaphysical:  knowing the true nature of the universe or the self
  • Knowledge is not always good!
• Connectedness to / separation from God
  • Humans can be connected to the divine in different ways:
    • by being given commands
    • by being given rituals
    • by talking together
    • etc.
  • Separation from God is a more common problem than we thought:
    • We rediscovered it in Genesis, in the act of hiding from God.
    • The Vedas have the universe and God himself falling apart, and humans having to reestablish a connection to Prajapati by putting him back together so that he can help them.
• Human ability and inability
  • We reaffirmed the Qur'an's statement of human goodness, but also rediscovered indications of human inability in the Qur'an:  forgetfulness, carelessness, and the fact that God needs to intervene.
  • Q and Romans say inability is sometimes inherited.
  • Q and Romans 7 say failure is due not to intrinsic inability, but to outside forces between which humans are torn.
  • Romans 6 talks about a choice between two natures
• Divine initiative
  • Q and Romans say God's initiative and intervention are necessary for salvation.
  • But the Veda made human intervention necessary to save Prajapati.
• Optimism / pessimism
  • Romans and Q hold out hope for salvation from the effects of Adam and Eve's sin.
  • But some Rabbis did not!

We also started to develop a sophisticated model of where the meaning of texts resides, and how comparison helps us find it or keeps us from finding it:

• What an author intends to communicate through words.
  • Comparison across texts and religions, rather than within one text or religion, is making us miss much of the relevant context that would help us understand individual texts.
  • Comparison also forces texts to answer our abstract questions such as human nature, when sometimes they are not intending to address those questions.  This distorts their intended meaning.
• The conceptual vocabulary within which an author operates.
  • On the other hand, even if an author didn't intend to talk about human nature, his or her assumptions about human nature, and the limited ways of thinking about humans that he or she has available in his or her linguistic and cultural and religious system, are all reflected in the way he or she talks and in the very vocabulary he or she uses.
  • This is something that postmodern "critical theorists" such as Roland Barthes have noticed about language:  it is not just the sentences we choose to utter that convey meaning; the linguistic system within which we speak itself embodies certain meanings (e.g. certain messages about gender).
  • Comparison of texts helps us identify assumptions and ways of thinking that the author may not have even been aware of because they were built into his or her vocabulary and way of speaking and thinking.
  • This means comparison is helping us look behind what people think they are telling us, as if we were psychoanalyzing them.  Is this an appropriate way to listen to people?  It certainly might help us understand them, but it also means we are not taking their words at face value, or letting them define themselves to us.
• The place a text has in the life of its community.
  • The way a text is used by its religious community - as a moral or theological reference book, as a prayer, as a sacred object or as a door stop, as written text or oral performance - itself gives the text a kind of meaning that is not necessarily expressed in its words.
  • We still need to find some concrete examples of these meanings that are not expressed in words but are embodied in the way a text is used.