A temple of the living spirit.
CONCLUSION
I SHOULD like to conclude this brief and fragmentary discussion of myths and symbols in Indian art and civilization with a general remark and then a little parable which has been among my favorites since I came to know it some ten years ago.
As for the general remark:
It is well known that our Christian Western tradition has long refused to accept the wisdom of the pagans on an equal footing with the body of revelation that it cherishes and worships as its own.
The books that it accepts as divinely inspired are the Four Gospels, penned by four members of the early Christian community, the pamphlets addressed by St. Paul to certain small, ex-Jewish, heretical communities in Salonika and Cappadocia, and in the oriental quarters of Rome and Corinth, a few minor letters to other communities composed by other apostles (as it were, mere typewritten or mimeographed sheets,
quite inconspicuous and unknown at the time, yet destined to outlive and outshine all the marketable best-sellers of the period), and then together with these the cryptic, somewhat delirious Book of Revelation; added to this Christian corpus are the very different tribal records of the legendary
history of the Chosen People (including a biography of their jealous, wrathful God) as shaped and colored by Jewish leaders back from exile.
These and only these have we deigned to accept as the all-comprehensive source of guidance for the human soul.
And yet, there has been a semi-liberal, timid, and guarded acknowledgment that in pagan tradition also there may be found some light, the “natural light,” a kind of bedimmed reflex of the truth of revelation.
The most enlightened, virtuous, and pious souls of Antiquity, even though pagan and deprived of both baptism and the Lord’s gospel, are not inmates of the hell-pit proper.
Dante, touring the circles of the underworld, encountered them in a sort of idyllie, Elysian lobby, near the entrance to, yet set quite apart from, the frightening inner apartments of the satanic Inferno.
He recognized in that outer circle Socrates and Plato, Democritus, Diogenes, Anaxagoras and Thales, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Zeno, Dioscorides, Orpheus, Cicero, Livy, Seneca, Euclid, Ptolemy, Hippocrates and Galen, together with the Muslim authorities on Hellenistic philosophy and science, Avicenna and Averroes, and then, along with these, Noah and Moses, Abraham, Abel, King David, Jacob and his sons, Rachel, and even the wise Muslim ruler, Saladin; furthermore, many heroic and pious figures of Greek mythology were there: Hector of Troy, Aeneas and Caesar, Penthesilea, Electra, Lucretia, and many others.-
The fact that there are virtue, wisdom, and inspiration to be found even among the historical enemies of Christianity, the Jews who hung the Savior on the tree, the Romans who persecuted he martyrs, the Muslims who battled the Crusaders, was ever acknowledged by the broad-minded, orthodox doctrine of medieval Christianity, and is to this day upheld by the Roman Catholic Church-though it was rejected by certain Protestant denominations of narrow-minded, fanatical, Calvinistic extraction.
During the Renaissance, there was even a moment (represented strikingly in the figure of Pico della Mirandola) when the last walls of orthodox exclusiveness seemed about to yield, and Ovid, Homer, the Kabbalah, the Koran, were being found to be in essential concord with the sacred pamphlets of the Christian movement.
Behind the variety of symbols, a universally constant, vastly sophisticated, tradition of human wisdom was joyfully recognized, and was on the point, even, of being officially conceded by the guardians of the “One True Faith.”
There is a humorou~ Jewish parable in the tradition of the Hassidim (this is the text on which I wish to close) that brings into an eloquent image the final sense to the individual of a broad-minded, fearless adventure into the worlds of “gentile”
faith and life.
When I first read this tale,t some ten years ago, I realized that I had been living and acting along its lines for over a decade-ever since that moment when the millenary, spiritual, treasure of Hindu myth and symbol had begun to reveal itself to me through my academic studies of Indian sacred diagrams and Mandalas, in conjunction with research in the Tantras and Puranas.
It is a brief story, told of the Rabbi Eisik, son of Rabbi Jekel, who lived in the ghetto of Cracow, the capital of Poland.
He had remained unbroken in his faith, through years of affliction, and was a pious servant of the Lord his God.
One night, as this pious and faithful Rabbi Eisik slept, he had a dream; the dream enjoined him to proceed, afar, to the Bohemian capital, Prague, where he should discover a hidden treasure, buried beneath the principal bridge leading to the castle of the Bohemian kings.
The Rabbi was surprised, and put off his going. But the dream recurred twice again.
After the third call, he bravely girded his loins and set forth on the quest.
Arriving at the city of his destiny, Rabbi Eisik discovered sentries at the bridge, and these guarded it day and night; so that he did not venture to dig.
He only returned every morning and loitered around until dusk, looking at the bridge, watching the sentries, st,:!gyjng.J~.~os!enta~iously the masonry and the soil.
At length, the captain of the guards, struck by the old man’s persistence, approached, and gently inquired whether he had lost something or perhaps was waiting for someone to arrive.
Rabbi Eisik recounted, simply and confidently, the dream that he had had, and the officer stood back and laughed.
“Really, you poor fellow'” the captain said; “Have you worn your shoes out wandering all this way only because of a dream?
What sensible person would trust a dream?
Why look, if I had been one to go trusting dreams, I should this very minute be doing just the opposite.
I should have made just such a pilgrimage as this silly one of yours, only in the opposite direction, but no doubt with the same result. Let me tell you my dream.”
He was a sympathetic officer, for all of his fierce mustache, and the Rabbi felt his hean warm to him. “I dreamt of a voice,” said the Bohemian, Christian officer of the guard, “and it spoke to me of Cracow, commanding me to go thither and to search there for a great treasure in the house of a Jewish rabbi whose name would be Eisik son of Jeke!.
T he treasure was to have been discovered buried in the dirty corner behind the stove.
Eisik son of JekeU” the captain laughed again, with brilliant eyes.”
Fancy going to Cracow and pulling down the walls of every house in the ghetto, where half of the men are called Eisik and the other half JekelJ Eisik son of Jekel. indeed'”
And he laughed. and he laughed again at the wonderful joke.
The unostentatious Rabbi listened eagerly. and then. having bowed deeply and thanked his stranger-friend. he hurried straightway back to his distant home. dug in the neglected corner of his house and discovered the treasure which put an end to all his misery.
With a portion of the money he erected a prayerhouse that bears his name to this day.
Now the real treasure. to end our misery and trials. is never far away; it is not to be sought in any distant region; it lies buried in the innermost recess of our own home. that is to say. our own being.
And it lies behind the stove. the life-and-warmth giving center of the structure of our existence. our heart of hearts-if we could only dig.
But there is the odd and persistent fact that it is only after a faithful journey to a distant region. a foreign country. a strange land. that the meaning of the inner voice that is to guide our quest can be revealed to us.
And together with this odd and persistent fact there goes another. namely. that the one who reveals to us the meaning of our cryptic inner message must be a stranger. of another creed and a foreign race.
The Bohemian captain at the bridge does not believe in inner voices or in dreams. yet he opens to the stranger from afar the very thing that terminates his troubles and brings to fulfillment his quest.
Nor does he do this wonderful thing by intention; on the contrary quite inadvertently his epochal message is delivered while he is making a special point of his own.
Hindu myths and symbols. and other signs of wisdom from afar in just such a way will speak to us of the treasure which is our own.
And we then must dig it up from the forgotten recesses of our own being.
And at last it will end for us our troubles and permit us to erect for the benefit of all around us a temple of the living spirit. ~Heinrich Zimmer, Myth ad Symbosl in Indian Art and Civilization, Page 217-221
