There are
many things to be particularly appreciated in the novel Siddhartha by
Hermann Hesse, and one of them is that it shows how a Westerner can interpret a
message that is really far from his own culture – especially considering the
historical moment when Hesse was writing his great book. An Eastern master will
probably not see much in Hesse's novel, although the book reaches the Eastern
way as close as a Westerner could. Siddhartha, as described by Hesse, is a
character between East and West, a sort of "innocent Zarathustra"
(Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, not the historical Zoroaster). In Hermann
Hesse’s book we find statements like: “had to sink to the greatest mental
depths, to thoughts of suicide, in order to experience grace, to hear Om again,
to sleep deeply again and to awaken refreshed again”. An Eastern master would
not be capable of understanding, for example, the Hamletic “problem” of suicide
because in this form it is a typical Western issue (see also Albert Camus’ The
Myth of Sisyphus: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,
and that is suicide.”)
The
Eastern master might tell you that “to be” or “not to be” are one and the same
so, what’s the problem? For the Easterner, shallowness and depth are just two
different ways of the Om and you can’t “hear” the Om (although you can chant it) but be and not be Om (also “be”
would be a troubling concept for the Eastern master because for a Westerner the
problem of being is a term deeply influenced by Parmenides…). All
Eastern concepts are somehow beyond Western systematic post-Ionian thinking,
and there is little we can do to properly approach those ideas because our way
of thinking is deeply and inevitably rooted into categories that are fundamentally
different from the ways of the East: “The Tao that can be spoken is not the
eternal Tao”. A definition is not a description and a description is not an
explanation. That’s a very important point where Western sciences get caught:
we believe that a more accurate description of a phenomenon is an explanation!
An Easterner would not fall into this trap. Easterner cannot be tricked like
that.
It is
also illusory (an Eastern master would never say “wrong” but “illusory”) to
believe or declare that Eastern thinking is about “non-dualism” (不二),
because “dualism” is once again a Western concept: basically it’s duality without
one half of it. Eastern thought (不二) is, to a certain extent, beyond duality,
which is a very different and difficult concept.
Those are
among the many reasons why it is also fundamentally wrong to speak about “Asian
Religions”, labeling Eastern spirituality with a Western name. “Religio” is
Roman terminology that cannot be applied to an Eastern way of thinking that has
little or no connection to Western theological concepts (at least after the IV
century B.C.)! It is the same as talking about an Argentinean camel! Well,
after all this is just another sign of the deep indifference for philosophical
questions of our age – most likely a byproduct of the vulgar materialism that
affects all levels of our society. The word “religion” comes from the Latin
term “religio” used by Cicero in his De natura deorum (II, 28). It is
even difficult to say that the Bible itself contains a “religion” in the way
that it was intended later, considering that in Hebrew there is no term that
could be equivalent to the Latin “religio” – the closest word used in Hebrew is
“dat” (דת or דתא) which means “law” or “custom”, and the faith of the Jews is
based on a covenant/pact (ברית, breet) with the Almighty. For as strange as it
might appear, the same issue exists in Greek where there is no apt term for “religion”,
at least in the way that it was intended later. The word ἐκκλησία, “ecclesia”,
which nowadays means “church” is used in Greek coming from ἐκκαλέω; a gathering
of citizens called out into a public place, associated, in the Septuaginta,
with קָהָל, which indicates also a gathering, but for sacred purposes, while
for Greek historians such as Thucydides, the word contains a clear political
meaning. Another Greek term used is Θρησκεία “Thriskia” which means “worship”
(see: http://www.oodegr.com/english/thriskies/genika/ennoia1.htm#[*]).
In modern Greek “thriskia” means “religion” in the Western sense, as it was
also used in the notorious slogan Πατρίς, Θρησκεία, Οικογένεια (Country, Religion, Family) used by the
Regime of the Colonels that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974.
The thinking of the East it’s
a crave for unity, while the thinking of the West is mainly about divisions (διαίρεσις)
and duality. The only points where East and West meet are in the mystics, where
both are craving again for unity. Of course we are talking about the past, but
not a remote past if Kipling could still write in his Ballad of East and
West that “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall
meet,” (1889) because nowadays, under the dark hat of globalization, the East has been “westernized”
as well, and there are only very minor differences between Eastern and Western
thinking: you can talk to a Chinese or a Japanese and find the same opinions as
a guy from Brooklyn or Bremerhaven. Globalization is, after all, a new
provincialism, the sad material provincialism of the West cunningly spread over
the entire planet.
(Sergio Caldarella)
