John (1)–
Manuscripts of the Gods: The Bible and Ancient Cultural Thresholds
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
“One is not one”
Right is not right; so is not so.…Leap into the boundless and make it your home.
Chuang Tzu 2.91
John’s seminal paradox is that the Word both was “God [theos]” and “with God [pros
ton theon]” (1.1) The first phrase asserts the identity of theos and Word.
The second phrase affirms difference: the Son has an individuality separate from
the Father. This establishes a basic literary pattern for later variation. In verse
10.30, for instance, Jesus declares, “I and [my] Father are one.” In 14.28, He reveals
“my Father is greater than I.” The early—Christian exegete Hippolytus noted, “He
did not say, ‘I and the Father am one, but are one’” (Ante—Nicene Fathers
5:226). So 10.30 is mysterious in and of itself, as is the distinction in 1.1 between
theos with and without a definite article. What can theos mean without
the article? Does it mean a god? That hardly seems to suit monotheism. Does it mean
divine? As Bultmann has well observed, theos is not an adjective (126).
The term “Trinity” is not biblical but comes from Christian commentaries
that struggle in different ways with the paradoxical unity and difference of the
Divine Persons. It has analogues in other faiths. . One of the Tunhuang scriptures,
the “Wake Up” Sermon ascribed to Bodhidharma, the founder of Ch’an, alludes to the
three bodies of the Buddha, a doctrine slightly similar to the Trinity in that it
deals with three mysteriously related, superhuman Persons and explains the incarnation
of the Ineffable into a human body. “Bodhidharma” accepts the truth of the doctrine,
yet considers those obsessed with it to be shallow in various ways, when what they
ought to do is not look to externals but discover the Buddha nature within themselves.
Bodhidharma [ascribed], The Zen Teachings, translated by Red Pine (San Francisco:
North Point Press, 1989), xvii, 71. Such an attitude is perhaps comparable to the
Bible’s condemning as idolatrous any physical image allowed to stand between the
worshipper and God even while sanctioning some mimetic art such as on the Ark of
the Covenant.
Diverse ways of explaining the Trinity have warred against one another with hundreds
of thousands slain (Monophysites, Arians, Nestorians, and so on). Etymologically,
“paradox … [is] that which is ‘beyond’ (Gk., para) ‘thinking’ (Gk., dokein),
which transcends the logical or conceptual” ( Fischer—Schreiber, et al. 182).
Chaology, however, suggests that paradoxes are not beyond all thinking, merely beyond
linear thinking. The “far—from—equilibrium” field that connects the participants
in scripture (author(s), lectors, and hearers) constitutes a paradigmatic experience
of their unity and separation. The gospel plays upon the theme of this connection.
Verses 17.22—-23 postulate the mysterious relationship of Father, Son, and believers:
| The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, even as thou hast loved me |
The oneness, consequently, extends beyond the Father and Son to
the faithful. The diversity apparently does also, in that describing an entity as
being within another one usually implies some distinction between them. John promises
a sharing beyond all loneliness yet a preservation of the individuality expected
by complex, literate societies.
Discovered in the Tunhuang area, an early Ch’an text reads: “The
Great Teacher [Tao—shin] said: ‘Zhuang Zi [Chuang Tzu] speaks of the oneness of heaven
and earth, and the oneness of the myriad things therein. A s—u tra says: “The
one is not one. [Oneness is propounded] to refute the multiplicity of objects. When
this is heard of by people with shallow consciousness, they think that the one is
one.”’ Thus, Zhuang Zi [Chuang Tzu] is still stuck on oneness” (“Records of the Teachers
and Students of the Lanka,” in Cleary Zen Dawn 65). The text is accusing
Chuang Tzu of a heresy that came to be called “Aku—by—o d—o ” (“bad sameness”) in
Japan. The Ch’an assumption is that a recognition of the sameness of things is a
sign of progress in spiritual development, but true enlightenment requires also recognition
of differences in the world (see Fischer—Schreiber 6.)
As Chuang Tzu recognizes that “so is not so,” he has essentially
the same insight as “one is not one” of the quoted scripture. Arguably, he gives
less emphasis to the differences within “boundless” unity than do the Ch’anists,
but the two sects are close enough so that they usually constituted a fairly friendly
rivalry, welcoming each other in their monasteries. According to Robert Magliola’s
Derrida on the Mend, Christianity has essentially the same, paradoxical insight,
which he finds as well in deconstruction (though he denies it to Taoism; 161).
The “far—from—equilibrium” swirl of meaning leads to a related
tendency: in each popularization lies some distinctly mysterious undercurrent, flowing
beyond conventional logic to justify avoidance of pedantry, as in the Gospel According
to John. It is arguably the best loved of the gospels. As already mentioned, it portrays
the Word of God not as a scholastically anatomized Torah but as a compassionate,
suffering Jesus. He is the Torah (Dodd 273); yet not a collection of scrolls. He
is one with the Father, yet less (14.28). He is one with believers, but not exactly.
Like genre mixing in the pien wen, phenomena are viewed from more than a single
perspective, producing a non—linear vision.
Given the ancient division between lectors and auditors, popularization
promised a shift in power from the one to the other. Exemplary of the power of lectors
were their verbal commentaries on what they read (e.g., the so—called “oral law,”
tracing its authority back to YHWH’s revelation on Sinai). Lectors’ position was
strong where some culture fought for continuity (such as Israel under its conquerors).
A conservative tradition heeds those whose literacy gives them the greatest knowledge
of the heritage. These “sages formed a distinct class during the first centuries
of the Common Era, distinguished, according to Sifre Deuteronomy (343),
‘by its walk, by its speech, and by its dress in the street” (Wilken xvi). Conversely,
when two or more cultures mix chaotically, a literate insistence on consistency cannot
cope with the pluralism. Rather, the oral bias toward approximateness is more appropriate.
A listener is closer to equal footing with an erudite “sage.” This growth toward
equality, however, is decidedly not equilibrium, but brings mobs ready to turn in
any direction, each member self—similar to its collective mood, shifting as quickly
as the sands of Tun-huang.
In sum, the multiple vision advanced by pluralism suits both a
paradoxical style and a reaction against the orderly slowness of literati. At any
rate, these two reactions may have converged at certain moments of pronounced poly-culturalism.
In the Far—East, for instance, the movement of Indian Buddhism into China occasioned
the rise of Ch’an (Zen), notable both for its paradoxical style and its general insistence
(in its own scriptures) that enlightenment is transmitted aside from scriptures.
One of the most important leaders in its development is Hui—Neng. According to the
Tun—huang version of the Liutsutashihfapaot’anching or Platform Sutra
(the earliest extant copy), he became enlightened upon hearing the Diamond Sutra
(Yampolsky 127). D. T. Suzuki comments, “If Zen … is a ‘special transmission
outside the scriptural teaching,’ the understanding of it must be possible even for
the unlettered and unphilosophizing.… This was in all likelihood the reason why Hui—neng
was unreasonably and sometimes even dramatically made unlettered” (Suzuki, 1956,
69—70).
Recall the portrait of Peter and John in Acts 4.13 as nonliterate
and common men (anthropoi aggramatoi … kai idiotai)) or Christ as wise in
the Word despite never having studied letters (John 7.15). Although a famous Ch’an
saying attributed to its founder forbids scriptures (“no setting up scriptures” pu—li
wen—tzu), the Platform Sutra can hardly be called anything else, and in it, Hui—neng’s
Enlightenment comes by hearing a text (Foulk in Gregory and Ebrey 151).
Despite being “outside the scriptures,” Zen has repeatedly described itself with
metaphors drawn from (yet contrasting with) literacy as in the Japanese expression
“hakushi” (white paper) to indicate consciousness during meditation (zazen).
In the Chinese Taoist/Buddhist novel Hsi—yu—chi, Buddha says that the true
scriptures are blank pages, but that since the Chinese would not understand these,
he sends ones with words (as a way of leading the Chinese until they are ready for
the other). The Mumonkan (the best known collection of Ch’an koans) proclaims,
“Words do not express [open, unroll] things” (yen wu chan shih), the word
chan being a metaphor of all things as closed scrolls. (Mumon 249).
Just as Ch’an (the meditation sect) sometimes denounced meditation as useless, so
it created a double bind by writing about the ineffectiveness of writing. When, for
example, according to its texts, a monk asked abbot Yunmen about a “Radiant light
[that] silently illumines the universe,” Yunmen recognized the words as those of
the scholar Chang Chuo and criticized the monk for being “trapped in words.” (Wumen
1993, 174). If, though, Yunmen’s own scholarship were not extensive and fresh in
his mind he would not have recognized the quotation.
Records of early Ch’an lives survive only in hagiographies, perhaps
little more than popular legends. “The realism that characterizes the records of
the patriarch’s words and deeds is often so finely detailed that it betrays the works
as fiction. This point is particularly apt in cases where not only the exact words
but also the unspoken thoughts of a master are quoted verbatim (Foulk in Ebrey and
Gregory 153). Even pious exaggerations, however, show what people expect paradigmatic
figures to be. In those hagiographies, a particular type repeatedly occurs: scholar
and mystic. Hui—K’o, the second patriarch, for instance, belonged to the literati
class (ju), but turned from annotation to meditation, then, before accepting
pupils, studied the Lank—a vat—a ra—s—u tra and “lived among simple working
people in order to develop … humility….” (Fischer-Schreiber 147). Thereby, he became
what auditors want as a lector: someone not merely erudite but aware of the ineffable
reality behind the words, yet humble, willing to empathize with the illiterate.
This, at least, is how Ch’an tradition sought to depict itself in a version of history completely accepted even by scholars before the Tun—huang discoveries (Gregory and Ebrey 20). Thus, scholarship once believed that from the Sung dynasty onward Ch’an declined, becoming literary, bureaucratic, and bickering–losing an early anti—literary, antinomian homogeneity. Unearthed at Tun—huang, apocryphal (i.e. later suppressed) Ch’an scriptures show the unity was certainly a myth and their profusion argues against any reluctance to write. What the early Ch’an indisputably developed was “a new rhetorical style”–a way with words (presented as a way with the Way; Gregory and Ebrey 21)). This rhetoric, which broke through the minutiae of doctrinal rules and metaphysics, vested an absolute, incontestable authority in abbots and abbesses whose awareness of the Infinite made their lecture—hall behavior transgress norms of decorum.
Outside that hall (at least during the Sung and thereafter), Ch’an monasteries were not merely places of meditation and manual labor but also of literary study under supervision of the “s—u tra prefect” in extensive libraries, reading halls, and areas for scroll copying. T. Griffith Foulk argues that being maestros imported from distant provinces to head a monastery, abbots were like mandarins (government scholars) running a highly regimented bureaucracy. The only exception to their mandarinlike propriety came in lecture—hall antics, an intermittent liminality like times of license in folk festivals. Noting that Ch’an did not become the dominant sect until government edicts forcibly converted large numbers of monasteries to it, he theorizes that the Emperor did so because the ambitions of the Ch’anists matched his own imperialism: “Precisely because the lineage was defined in terms of the transmission of something as utterly signless and ineffable as the Buddha—mind, not the transmission of any particular set of doctrines or religious practices, the Ch’an school was able to draw into its ranks monks and laypersons who in fact took a variety of approaches to Buddhist thought and practice.
This diversity and the depiction of the Ch’an lineage as a vast
extended clan that contained within itself all that was noble and successful in the
Buddhist tradition provided an ideological framework in the Sung for an attempted
consolidation of the Buddhist order that paralleled the political unification of
the empire” (in Ebrey and Gregory 194). This is a cynical way of describing a development
like that of the mysteries, which maintained themselves at the “edge of choas,” blending
order and disorder in a tolerance appreciated by governments.
One paradoxical oscillation in Christian mysticism, Taoism, and
Ch’an is interdependent scholasticism and anti—scholasticism, each with its season.
In Christianity, St. Francis, for instance, objected even to the ownership of a breviary.
His movement was supposedly an attempt to return to the mystical simplicity of Jesus
as Ch’an deemed itself a continuation of that of the Buddha. Actually, however, St.
Francis’s mixture of Provençal chivalry and various populisms required credentials
to escape charges of heresy repeatedly brought against his movement. Without his
charisma, followers who displayed their wisdom by scorning erudition needed monumental
libraries to suggest they knew what they were rejecting. Ch’an of the Sung dynasty
and thereafter embodied a comparable stage in manuscript culture to that of the Franciscan
St. Thomas Aquinas, who, according to his hagiography, terminated his life—long scholarship
and pronounced Reality ineffable. His having produced hundreds of manuscripts set
the proper context for that renunciation.
When Ch’an became Zen in Japan, there was again a multicultural
period when writings were relatively de-emphasized. In Kamakura, for instance, rather
than expect Samurais to study Chinese literature, some teachers would orally improvise
new koans (Fukuzan 21—32).
Thus, in Chinese/Japanese multiculturalism, the balance somewhat
shifted toward the auditor again. That shift, though, was far from radical, both
since scriptures were not abandoned and also since Chinese masters and Japanese pupils
often communicated through written translations. When the two cultures had more completely
synthesized into one (reducing pluralist tensions), Chinese k’ung-an returned
to a central place in the tradition, further augmented by Japanese writings. Typical
of that later age, Zen master Dogen remarked, “an enlightened person always masters
the sutras to full advantage” (Kraft 4). Some Zen monasteries even became centers
of Confucian studies.
According to a legend of Taoism, that faith originated when Lao
Tzu found records of a Western religion and mixed it with Chinese traditions. Based
on similarities between the concepts Tao and Brahman, Léon Wieger speculated
that the imported religion was Hinduism (Wieger). Religious Taoism, however, was
not entirely exempt from pedanticism and proliferation of written rules, particularly
as the oral tradition was recorded (and thus opened to further written commentary)
from the fourth century C.E. forward
In an introduction to a recently discovered Taoist text, Victor
H. Mair has resuscitated that theory, noting a yoga remarkably like that in Taoism
evolved in India over five—hundred years before it appeared in China (Mair 146).
Given the paradoxes of Taoist scriptures and their insistence that the ultimate truth
cannot be expressed, a multicultural origin for the religion does sound plausible–some
ambiance that encouraged a comparative rather than a narrow approach to tradition.
The Taoist classic Wen—Tzu, for instance, proclaims: “Knowledge is
easily developed by general comparisons; wisdom is hard to develop by petty distinctions”
(144).
As both early Ch’an and early Taoism seem to instance confluence
of pluralist background, paradoxical style, and anti—scholastic scholasticism, so
does the Gospel of John, which eruditely battles the “scribes.” In 1953, Charles
Dodd’s The Fourth Gospel masterfully demonstrated that considerable Hellenistic
eclecticism exists in it. Since then, its Judaic roots have attracted academic attention
(particularly similarities with the Qumran texts), but only to show that John’s syncretism
reflects that of his age. From the fourth century C.E. forward, with the rise of
government—supported Christian orthodoxy, John became a classic to harmonize with
itself and with the other gospels (e.g., the apparent difference in chronology between
the synoptics and John).
Ch’an, Taoism, and the Christianity of John resemble one another in each insisting
on its being superior to anything that may be derived pedestrianly from its written
precursors. Whether the hermeneutes with which it competes are Pharisees, Chinese
Legalists or Confucians, the mystical scriptures suggest that Wisdom does not come
from any methodical analysis of texts but from intuitive exegesis by such figures
as the Johannine Jesus (repeatedly finding evidence of Himself in Torah passages
that do not mention his name), Hui—Neng (enlightened by hearing a sutra others heard
without such a reaction), or Lao—Tzu (who habitually cites texts, yet disclaims the
possibility of anyone’s communicating the Tao). St. Paul’s preferring the spirit
to the letter is one variation on this general theme, whose forms depend on the cultural
mix experienced by the compilers of the text. In Tun—huang with Christianity, Ch’an,
and other faiths being introduced at approximately the same period, the mix was highly
unstable.
The first, documented, Christian missionizing of China was in the
seventh century C.E. by the Nestoreans (Cary—Elwes 20). It was the period of Hui-neng,
whom some scholars see as a seminal figure in the development of Ch’an–the one who
recast it in a more Chinese (particularly Taoist form) thereby preparing the way
for its rise to popularity. The first wave of Christianity lasted until 845, when
“the Chiristian monasteries, together with the Buddhist and Taoist, were suppressed.”
(Cary—Elwes 20). Perhaps earlier than Nestorean missionaries were the Manicheans,
but their teachings are such a mix that I am following the tradition of not calling
them “Christian” even though they did help spread some Christian ideas.
Wu Hua (Things Change)
|
the operation of feedback in dynamical systems causes things to become or engender their opposite. –Donald Palumbo, “Plots within Plots…” |
The history of religions is fraught with ironic reversals: Saul to Paul, et cetera.
Tun—huang entertained many wisdoms, each oscillating between a psychedelic rigor
that propelled breakthroughs and the new freedom those breakthroughs yielded. Chaology
proclaims “order falls apart into chaos … [and] chaos makes order” (Briggs and Peat
26, 43). The I Ching also preaches that extremes metamorphose into their opposites.
In John, the first public miracle that Jesus performs images such
a reversal: water to wine. Philo had used a partly similar imagery, “[Melchizadek]
shall bring forth wine instead of water and give our souls a pure draught, that they
may become possessed by that divine intoxication which is more sober than sobriety
itself; for he is the priest—logos….” (Leg. Alleg. 3.79 as translated in Dodd 298).
Platonically, however, he envisions the opposites (sobriety/intoxication) as simultaneous.
Instead, like chaology, John shows temporal transition between the sources of these
(water/wine).
Philo’s logos was his version of Biblical Wisdom (Hochma),
who cries “Come, eat of my bread, and drink of the wine which I have mingled. Leave
simpleness” (Proverbs 9.5). Thus, it considers Wisdom to be the intoxicating opposite
of simple order (“Wisdom, which is here said to have come into being even before
the creation of the world, was naturally identified with Torah….” (Cohen 28). As
Wisdom, Logos, Word, Jesus offers saving nourishment: “Whoso eateth my flesh, and
drinketh my blood, hath eternal life” (John 6.54). He defines that life as the experience
of spiritual wisdom: “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only
true God and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (17.3). Consequently, the wine is
wisdom as in Proverbs. Although many interpretations of the Bread/Flesh and Wine/Blood
exist, no major Christian tradition is so literal as to define the mass as unequivocal
cannibalism. Indeed, the polymath Christian exegete Origen (third—century C.E.) “sometimes
presumes the Gospel of John is without literal meaning …”( Kugel and Greer 183).
Its obscurity is its own intoxicating draft of wine.
In 1990, as part of a delegation of Rabbis and Jewish scholars
to the Dalai Lama, Moshe Waldoks quoted an Hasidic interpretation of the biblical
type “bread and wine” as symbolizing “words of wisdom.” Rabbi Zalman Schachter then
saw the one offering that “bread and wine” in Genesis 14.18, the gentile king Melchizedek,
as the type of the Dalai Lama with whom they hoped to share traditions. The act of
reading the Bible in a Buddhist area led hermeneutics toward what the faiths have
in common, a search for spiritual wisdom. (Kamenetz 42). If this could happen to
rabbinical scrupulousness, certainly one might expect ecumenism among the inhabitants
of poly-religious Tun—huang.
They would be familiar with numinous metaphors of interchange between opposites in the Chuang Tzu. Throughout the first two chapters, its author writes of miraculous transformations, concluding with the most famous: once, he woke to wonder if he were a man who had dreamed he were a butterfly flitting from flower ot flower (an embodiment of thoughtless freedom) or a butterfly now dreaming himself to be an order—bound human. The parable concludes: “[Chuang Tzu] with the butterfly–there must—be, then, a division. This it is which men call ‘things changing [wu hua]’” (Wu 153). Despite this clue that Chuang Tzu is writing metaphorically about magical change “countless followers of the Taoist school in later ages certainly interpreted [the fantasy literally].” Chuang Tzu 1968), 7).
Continue to John 3
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