MAYA AND SACRAMENT IN BEDE GRIFFITHS

by Brian J. Pierce, OP

My first "dabblings" in Hindu thought and theology were frequently met with frustrating encounters with the concept of maya, usually translated as illusion. It seemed like another subtle form of Manichaeism to me –another world-denying, matter-hating, dualistic ideology. St. Dominic, the founder of the spiritual family in which I have been formed, called the first brothers and sisters together in the early 1200’s precisely to combat such a heresy. I could not see how the Book of Genesis’lovely mantra –“and God saw that it was good”–could possibly be reconciled with a spiritual teaching that refers to the created world as illusion. In the depths of my heart, I truly believe that God does not create illusions.

It has taken several years to break through this impasse. I owe my insights to Fr. Bede Griffiths. I am sure that my Benedictine sisters at the Forest of Peace Ashram in Oklahoma will smile when I say that Fr. Bede would have made a very good Dominican! He had a profound respect and confidence in the world and in history. He loved creation. He loved humanity. I have never sensed any dualistic rejection of the material world in Bede’s writings. He certainly does not read the history of God’s pilgrim people –culminating in the incarnation of the Word –as illusion. And one could hardly read Fr. Bede’s reflection on his own spiritual awakening to the divine, as he so beautifully relates in the prologue to The Golden String, and come to the conclusion that he considered the material world an illusory obstacle to the spiritual path.

I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its song above my head, and then sank still singing to rest. Everything then grew still…I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God (GS, p.9).

I think that it is safe to say that for Bede, earth is definitely “crammed with heaven,”to use Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s phrase. Creation is not an illusion at all; it is an image of the very face of God.

It has been through reading and re-reading Bede’s writings, each time more and more amazed at his artful capacity to bridge Hindu and Christian spirituality and theology, that I have finally been able to glimpse the truth behind the Eastern teaching on the material world, the created world as maya. I think that the obstacle for me personally has been the word “illusion.”Illusion sounds to me –a westerner –like something false, not real, like a mirage in the desert. I am no great scientist, but I happen to know that the lovely crimson-colored rose outside my window, glistening in the morning sun as I write these very words, is not a mirage. It is, in fact, very real. Just yesterday I walked up to it to enjoy its aroma. Why does Hindu thought insist on calling it maya, was my question for years. Am I supposed to pretend that the beautiful rose is just a construct of my imagination? To do that I’d have to lie to myself.

Luckily, the scales began to fall from my eyes little by little. I do not know if Bede makes this exact statement, but I would venture to say, based on the insights I have gleaned from his writings, that Fr. Bede would be comfortable saying that the crimson-colored rose is not an illusion at all; it is a sacrament. Christian theology defines a sacrament as a symbolic sign or gesture that actually has the power to make present that which it symbolizes. In the sacrament of baptism we touch the living Christ who is truly present.

What Fr. Bede’s has helped me to see is that the Hindu doctrine of maya actually resembles quite closely what we might call a kind of sacramental theology. Sacramental theology, of course, encompasses a broader spectrum than just the seven sacraments that the Western Church groups together as having a special place in Christian worship and discipleship. There are many ways that God’s presence in Christ is mediated to us sacramentally. Making a pilgrimage to a holy place, for example, can be a very powerful sacramental experience. This was certainly true in medieval Europe, and continues today in many parts of the world.

What Fr. Bede experienced in the theophany that he describes in The Golden String was certainly a sacramental experience. The sacramental signs of nature opened him up to the presence of God. As Bede himself frequently cites from the Bible, “The Spirit of the Lord has filled the world”(Wisdom 1:7 –another way to say that “earth is crammed with heaven”). It is because of this fullness that the whole world takes on a sacramental character. All of creation becomes a place where we encounter God. This is what we sing about in the Canticle of Daniel: “Bless the Lord, all that grows in the ground; sing praise to God and highly exalt him forever…Bless the Lord, seas and rivers; sing praise to God and highly exalt him forever”(Dn 3:76-78). Creation sings to God, because creation is full of God’s presence. The divine music present in the material world is, in fact, its very essence. As Bede notes, “Every material thing is a kind of incarnation, an expression in terms of matter and energy and life of the one supreme reality”(MEW, p.103).

Someone else experiencing the spectacular sunset and the lovely music of the lark that radically changed Bede’s life might have just called it a profound encounter with the beauty of nature. For Bede it was something much greater than that. The experience was sacramental; his heart was opened up to a face-to-face glimpse of Truth itself. As he himself says, the sky seemed but a veil covering over the face of God.

A sacrament is the doorway through which we come into God’s presence. The door itself is not God; it is an instrument. What Bede and the East are attempting to do through the teaching on maya is to invite us not to spend our entire lives marveling at the beautiful door, but to walk through it into the transcendent Reality we call God. When Jesus prophesied about the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, they thought he was crazy (Lk 21:5-19). They thought he had turned against the Jewish faith and the sacred dwelling place of God. Jesus was actually trying to do just the opposite. He was trying to show them the way beyond the external sign of the temple with its “beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God”into the real Temple of God’s very Self.

In The Marriage of East and West, Bede carefully spells out the teaching on maya, showing its compatibility with the Judeo-Christian tradition. He begins with a quote from St. Paul: “Ever since the creation of the world God’s invisible nature, namely his eternal power and divinity has been clearly perceived in the things that are made”(Rom 1:20). Bede elaborates:

From the beginning of history, as far as one can tell, [humanity] has recognized behind all the phenomena of nature and consciousness a hidden power…There is not a particle of matter in the universe, not a grain of sand, a leaf, a flower, not a single animal or human being which has not its eternal being in that One, and which is not known in the unitive vision of the One. What we see is the reflection of all the beauty of creation through the mirror of our senses and our imagination, extended in space and time. But there in the vision of the One all the multiplicity of creation is contained, not in the imperfection of its becoming but in the unity of its being”(MEW, pp.89, 92).

One of the keys to Bede’s clarifying insights, at least as far as my own understanding, has been his use of the phrase, “behind all the phenomena of nature.”This phrase finally opened up the deeper meaning of the concept of maya for me personally. The idea of a greater Reality which stands behind and manifests itself in the natural world is much easier for my Western mind to grasp than the term “illusion.”To marvel in the beauty of creation, then, is in no way an obstacle to grasping the ultimate Truth of God. Natural beauty, the human body and mind, art, sexuality, even politics and public discourse –all have the capacity to reflect of the beauty of God. Meister Eckhart says something very similar: “All that God ever created is nothing but an image and a sign of eternal life.”There is certainly no dualistic Manichaeism in this theology.

For Bede, then, every expression of life in the natural world, every moment in the life of a human being has the possibility of opening us up to a sacramental encounter with God. The crimson-colored rose has the full potential of being a sacrament of God’s beauty and goodness –as long as I am willing to gradually allow the eye of my heart to be opened to that which is behind the rose, that “supreme reality”which has become incarnate in the rose. For the time being I am able to glimpse this revelation intuitively, “dimly as in a mirror”(1Cor 13:12), but this intuitive glimpse is what the spiritual journey is all about. We are always on a journey to an ever deeper seeing. The other option is to fall down and worship the rose as Ultimate Reality, and thus be caught in the trap of maya.

In several of his writings Fr. Bede uses a parable from the Chandogya Upanishad to underline the truth of the one, unifying, supreme Reality that stands behind and beneath all phenomena. From A New Vision of Reality:

The guru tells the disciple to take a fruit from the tree, break it open and then take a seed and break it open, and he asks the disciple what he can see. The disciple says, ‘I see nothing,’to which the guru replies, ‘In that nothing, that hidden essence which you cannot see, the power of the growth of the whole tree consists…Thou, Svetaketu, art that’(NVR, p.64).

In other words, notes Bede, there is only one ultimate Source of life, only one ultimate Reality: “The source of the universe around us is the source of our own being.”To contemplate the evening song of a lark or the beauty of a crimson-colored rose is to open ourselves to that hidden essence which is behind all that exists.

In a talk entitled “Modern Physics and the Eucharist”which Fr. Bede gave at Shantivanam Ashram in South India in 1989, he delves further into this teaching on sacrament, relating it directly to the sacrament of the eucharist. Using the Thomistic distinction between sign and reality, Bede cautions his listeners not to get caught up in the sacramental doorway that the eucharist itself proposes to be. “St. Thomas Aquinas has a very definite vocabulary here,”says Bede. “A sacramentum for him is a sign. All sacraments are signs…The bread and the wine in that sense are sacramental signs, and the reality behind the sign [is what Thomas] calls the res, the thing. So we have the sacramentum, the sign, and the res, the reality. The bread and the wine themselves are a sacramentum –a sign –but through and with and in that sign the reality of Jesus is present…a spiritual body and spiritual blood and that soul of Jesus, the consciousness of Jesus transformed and now one with the Divine Consciousness”(pp.8-9; MEW, p.43).

What Bede is saying here is that the eucharist is one of the most important doorways through which we enter into the presence of the Risen Christ. But he is also raising a note of caution: a person could conceivably become so attached to the physicality of the eucharist –the consecrated host and wine –that the person would actually end up distancing him or herself from the actual encounter with Christ. This, too, would be to fall into the trap of maya. In the end, we are called to be disciples of the Living Christ and not of the consecrated bread and wine. The eucharist is the sacramental doorway that leads us into an encounter with Christ, the beloved Son of God.

Maya, then, can be a very important teaching for us. In our present day, given the rise of religious fundamentalism in some sectors of almost all of the world’s great religions, the teaching on maya is one which we must look at again. The transcendent One, whom we call by different names, is always greater than any name or description. The holy scriptures of the different spiritual traditions (Upanishads, Torah, Bible, Koran, etc.) are sacramental doorways which have the capacity of leading us into the presence of God. This is what we discover in Lectio Divina. The Word of God can actually open us up to a face-to-face encounter with God. In and of themselves, though, the scriptures are sacramentum; they are not the divine Res itself. They are not God. “No words can ever express what God is,”says Bede (MEW, p.101). Even the words of the Bible can become maya, for it is possible to be attached to sacred words about God while turning our backs on the very presence and Truth of God.

For Fr. Bede, to embrace the teaching of maya is ultimately a path to spiritual freedom, for in so doing one chooses to live one’s whole life in a detached manner –refusing to give ultimate obedience to any-thing or any-one but God alone. In his own life, this freedom was symbolized, sacramentalized, through his choice to consecrate the last half of his life to God by living as a sannyasi –a person who renounces the world to seek God alone. “A sannyasi,”says Bede, “is one who renounces not only the world in the biblical sense of the world of sin, the world which today is so clearly set on the path of destruction. A sannyasi renounces the whole world of ‘signs,’of appearances…The sannyasi is one who is called to witness to this Truth of Reality behind the signs, to be a sign of that which is beyond signs”(MEW, pp.42-43). In the words of the Isa Upanishad, we can almost hear Fr. Bede’s own heart lifted up in prayer:

The face of truth remains hidden behind a circle of gold. Unveil it, O God of light, that I who love the true may see. (v. 15, The Upanishads, Penguin Classics, 1965, trans. Mascaró, p.50).

Bede seems to be teaching us that, from a certain perspective, our entire life can be understood as maya –a sacramental reflection of a greater Reality. Careful not to denigrate the beauty and value of human life, the life of the sannyasi points us beyond all that is good in this world to the One who is the fountain of goodness itself. The spiritual path of a sannyasi is like that of a shooting star, quickly progressing into the dark cave of the heart, into the unmitigated presence of the One who is without name. For the sannyasi, notes Bede, the phenomenal world simply disappears. His or her whole life is directed to that Reality which is behind the phenomenal world –God. Bede points to the life of Jesus as an example:

Jesus himself, the great sannyasi, disappeared after the resurrection…Only when he had gone could the Spirit come. Like the Master, the disciple must disappear.

An ‘ashram’is only a stopping place, in which a sannyasi may live for a time…So also every Church, every religion, every human community, is only a stopping place, a tent which is pitched on this earth by pilgrims who are on their way to the City of God…When we have entered the City there are no more walls and no gates, for faith itself must pass away…For those who are willing to die, death is the gateway to eternal life (MEW, p.43).

It seems, then –if we follow Bede’s thinking through to its logical conclusion –that death itself is, for the pilgrim, the great sacrament, for when death is embraced, the final veil drops away; maya is no more. “We have to die in order that we may live,”says Bede, whose life was saturated with the paschal mystery. In death “we will see face to face”that which in this life we have only glimpsed. “Then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known”(1Cor 13:12).

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Brian J. Pierce, OP has ministered most of his Dominican life in Latin America. He lived with the Benedictine sisters at the Forest of Peace Ashram in Oklahoma for a year and a half in the late 90’s, and has twice visited Shantivanam Ashram in southern India. He presently lives in Lima, Peru. In 2005 Orbis Books published his book "We Walk the Path Together: Learning From Thich Nhat Hanh and Meister Eckhart.".

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