Ecclesiastes (2)–
Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
A Mahayanist Perspective
[Taxilan Buddha]
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All the possessions of a previous King come under
the control of his successor. —Nagarjuna, Jewel Garland of Royal Counsels Yea, I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun: because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me. —Ecclesiastes 2.18 |
Ruler of many such northern Indian cities as Taxila for much of the second century
C.E., the emperor Kaniska called a great Buddhist Council. It is “generally
regarded as the beginning–point of true Mahayana” (Woodcock 161). Called the “second
Buddha,” the most famous early Mahayanist philosopher, Nagarjuna, wrote Jewel
Garland of Royal Counsels, a letter to a king—according to Stephan Beyer, Kanishka
(Ikeda 138). This would date the philosopher to that second century. His education
was in the North of India, connected with the university where he later taught. Legend
gives his knowledge a more magical source among the northern mountains (Wookcock
131). Therein, two childlike supernatural beings, impressed by his skill at disputation,
opened the earth, bringing him into the realm of the Nagas (dragonlike embodiments
of Wisdom). In that kingdom, he received a major Mahayana scripture, the ´S
atas–a hasr–i kaprajñ–a p–a ramit–a s–u tra. Thus, legend makes a philosopher
and interpreter of texts into the vehicle by which one of these reaches humanity.
There is, nonetheless, a subtle but important difference between this magical source and the paranormal origin of the Theravada canon. The latter comes from a disciple’s miraculously remembering all the words of the Enlightened Buddha, thereby making them accessible to the world. Interpretation of them belonged to such pundits as N–a gasena, whose most outstanding quality is his vast memory. He recalls the texts, harmonizes their seeming discrepancies, but does not probe deeply below the surface. In and of themselves, the scriptures embody the transcendent Truth (albeit temporarily). For Nagarjuna, however, “a word does not acquire meaning in virtue of having an objective reference, but only in virtue of the role it plays within a particular language–game”(Robbins 6).
Already in the early Buddhist scriptures the focus is not the ontological nature of Truth but the way it is conveyed. Nagarjuna extends this tendency, saying all is empty (´s–u nya)—devoid of any discrete essence that could be presented in language (Robbins 9). In his letter to the king, for instance, Nagarjuna illustrates the emptiness of existence with examples reminiscent of Ecclesiastes, e.g., its vaporlike instablity like “a bubble blown about by the wind” (Kawamura 52) and corporial dissolution (Kawamura 52)..Mahayana allows for practical purposes one to enunciate moral and religious principles, but this condescension only employs language in an approximate, metaphorical, and indirect (neyyattha) manner. The only direct (nitattha) statement possible is that all is ´s–u nya.
´Sunya originally meant atmosphere, making it analogous to that frequently used term of Ecclesiastes hebel, variously translated vain, empty, meaningless, as well as breath or vapor. In Ecclesiastes, hebel means ephemeral but also transcending human wisdom, for only God knows the true nature of the world:
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Then I beheld all the work of God, that a man cannot find out … though a wise [man] think to know [it], yet shall he not be able to find [it]. (Ecclesiastes 8:17) |
The wise “cannot find [it] out,” yet the author “beheld” it. A late Mahayanist approach
to this paradox might be to consider the beholding a direct, intuitive glimpse of
reality (like the Zen kensho) while the process of finding out is analysis
and classification (the way of language). Any denial of the dependability of language
(such as Nagarjuna makes) implies that author and reader are communicating outside
language, since, if language really is totally undependable it cannot be relied on
even to prove its inadequacy. Unable to demonstrate anything, the text functions
to shock or goad the reader into intuition.
Some of the last verses in Ecclesiastes read:
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Vanity [hebel]of vanities, saith the preacher;
all [is] vanity. (Ecclesiastes 12.8-11) |
To a second century Taxilan, these might sound very like Mahayana. Although all mundanity
is vain, the speaker wisely chose to address the ordinary people in “acceptable words.”
These were true but only in the sense that they tended to drive the people in the
right direction as a shepherd goads sheep. Expressed more directly, reality is emptiness
and a striving after wind. From the Buddhist point of view, the closing reference
to the commandments would sound little different from much Buddhist insistence that
emptiness does not circumvent ethics but, indeed, requires a life of moral discipline
(in addition to meditation, etc.) as preparation for living in harmony with the void.
With Mahayana, no longer can one place one’s faith literally in the words of the scriptures. One is always looking beyond them, seeking a direct, intuitive contact with the supposed author, whose words can never fully convey his or her Enlightenment. Consequently, Bodhisattvas and Buddhas (as the putative authors of the texts or as personifications of Enlightenment or as superior beings contacted directly) became more important and proliferated in number. When minting a coin representing the Buddha, Menander (before the efflorescence of Mahayana) followed the early convention, depiction of a wheel—symbolic of the Buddhist path. When Kanishka issued his Buddhist coin, it is the first extant that shows the Buddha himself. Contemporaneously, painters and sculptors were also, probably for the first time, doing the same in other media (though the chronology has recently become controversial; See Hungtington 401–408). In that letter to a (royal) friend (Suh.rllekha),
Nagarjuna writes:
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A wise man will worship any image of the Buddha, even of wood, however poorly made: then do not despise my poor poem, for it is based on the teachings of the holy Law (Beyer 10). |
At an earlier period, he could not have made this comparison, if, as is usually assumed, there were no such statues. Although his sentiment is a conventional self–deprecation, his way of expressing it is presumably new and very much in keeping with his philosophy. The worshippers are to look through the imperfect image and poem to something those fail to present. In its very emptiness, its “chaotic” formlessness, mere breath divorced from referentiality, Nagarjuna’s notion of language is analogous to his idea of the emptimess of Reality itself. For Nagarjuna, the ineffability of the Real may be rooted in the distance between actual writing and the enlightening Voice that the pious expect to find. Unlike Deconstruction, Buddhism and Ecclesiastes still have hope of intuiting significant patterns in the “chaos.”
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