Out of Our Minds

by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

  At Dunhuang, beyond China’s western borders, in a region of desert and mountains, ‘the roads to the western ocean’ converged, according to a poem inscribed in a cave that sheltered travellers, like veins in a throat.7 Here, a generation after Zhang Qian’s mission, the victorious Chinese general, Wudi, knelt before ‘golden men’ – captured idols taken, or perhaps mistaken, for Buddhas – to celebrate his success in obtaining horses from Fergana.8 From Dunhuang, so-called Silk Roads skirted the Taklamakan Desert toward kingdoms beyond the Pamir, linking with routes that branched off into Tibet or India, or continued across the Iranian plateau. It took thirty days to cross the Taklamakan, clinging to the edges, where water drains from the heights. In Chinese accounts of the daunting journey, screaming demon drummers personified the ferocious winds, but at least the desert deterred bandits and the predatory nomads who lived beyond the surrounding mountains.

  While travel and trade trawled a net across Eurasia, individual masters of thought, celebrities in their day, seemed to get caught in it. We can glimpse these big fish flashing briefly, then disappearing among shoals of usually unidentifiable disciples. Because they or their followers often travelled as pilgrims or missionaries or gatherers or disseminators of sacred texts, it makes sense to try to isolate the sages’ religious thinking before we turn to secular topics.

  ‌New Religions?

  To reach the sages’ genuine thoughts, we have to acknowledge the unreliability of the sources. Texts attributed to the sages often date from generations after their deaths and survive only because followers lost confidence in the authenticity of oral transmission. Forgeries, pious or profiteering, abound. Chronologies are often vague. Zoroaster, who dominated mainstream thinking in Iran for a thousand years and influenced other Eurasian religions, is a case in point, insecurely dated to the late seventh and early sixth centuries bce in Iran. Nothing solid can be said of his life or the background that produced him. Texts ascribed to him are so partial, corrupt, and obscure that we cannot reconstruct them with confidence.9 According to tradition, he preached a doctrine that recalls the dualism of earlier traditions: contending forces of good and evil shaped the world; a good deity, Ahura Mazda, dwelt in fire and light. Rites in his honour summoned dawn and kindled fire, while night and darkness were the province of Ahriman, god of evil. Almost equally inaccessible is the sage Mahavira, purportedly a rich prince who renounced riches in revulsion from the world in the sixth century bce: the earliest texts of Jainism, the religious tradition that venerates him as its founder, do not even mention him. Jainism is an ascetic way of life designed to free the soul from evil by means of chastity, detachment, truth, selflessness, and unstinting charity. Though it attracted lay followers and still commands millions of them, it is so demanding that it can only be practised with full rigour in religious communities: a religious Jain prefers starvation to ungenerous life and will sweep the ground as he walks rather than tread on a bug. Jainism never drew a following outside India except in migrant communities of Indian origin.

  As well as acknowledging the imperfections of the evidence about new religions, we have to allow for the possibility that what seems religious to us might not have been so to the sages; we must also resist the assumption that religion, as we now understand it, launched every new intellectual departure of the age. In a period when no one recognized a hard-and-fast distinction between religion and secular life, it is still hard to say, for instance, whether Confucius founded a religion. While enjoining rites of veneration of gods and ancestors, he disclaimed interest in worlds other than our own. His dissenting admirer, Mozi, called for universal love on secular grounds (as we shall see), four hundred years before Christians’ religious version. Like those of Confucius and Mozi, Siddhartha Gautama’s doctrines were on the margins of what we usually think of as religion, as he ranged, teaching and wandering, over an uncertain swathe of eastern India, probably between the mid-sixth and early fourth centuries bce (recent scholarship makes chronological precision impossible).10 Like Mahavira, he wanted, it seems, to liberate devotees from the afflictions of this world. His disciples, who called him ‘the Buddha’ or ‘the Enlightened One’, learned to seek happiness by escaping desire. With varying intensity for different individuals according to their vocations in life, meditation, prayer, and unselfish behaviour could lead the most privileged practitioners to elude all sense of self in a mystical state called nirvana (or ‘extinction of the flame’). The Buddha’s language avoided echoes of conventionally religious terms. He seems never to have made any assertions about God. He decried the notion that there is anything essential or immutable about an individual person – which is why Buddhists now avoid the word ‘soul’.

  But the pull of religious thinking tugged at Buddhism. The notion that the self survives the death of the body, perhaps many such deaths in the course of a long cycle of death and rebirth, resounds in early Buddhist writings. In a famous text, recorded in eighth-century China, the Buddha promised that a righteous person can be born as an emperor for hundreds or thousands of aeons. This aim of self-liberation from the world, whether by individual self-refinement or by losing oneself in selflessness, was common in Indian religions: in any case it was likely to be a long job. The distinctive element in Buddhists’ account of the process was that it was ethical: justice governed it. The soul would inhabit a ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ body in each successive life as the reward of virtue or the derogation due to vice.

  The Buddha’s devotees gathered in monasteries to help guide each other toward this rather indistinct form of enlightenment, but individuals in worldly settings could also achieve it, including, in many early Buddhist stories, merchants, seafarers, and rulers. This flexibility helped create powerful, rich, widespread constituencies for Buddhism – including, from the third century bce onward, rulers willing to impose it, sometimes with scant attention to the Buddha’s own pacifism, by force. In 260 bce, for instance, the Indian emperor Ashoka expressed regret for the bloody consequences of his conquest of the kingdom of Kalinga: 150,000 deportees, 100,000 killed, ‘and many times that number who perished … The sound of the drum has become the sound of the Buddha’s doctrine, showing the people displays of heavenly chariots, elephants, balls of fire, and other divine forms.’11 In this respect, too, Buddhism resembles other religions, which may be meritorious but rarely succeed in making people good.

  Some of the most unambiguously religious ideas, including those of the last of the great sages, whom we usually call Christ, emerged from among people later known as Jews (Hebrews, Israelites, and other names have had some currency at different periods for different writers): no group of comparable size has done more to shape the world. They and their descendants made transforming, long-term contributions to almost every aspect of the life of Western societies, and hence, by a kind of knock-on effect, to the rest of the world, especially in the arts and sciences, economic development, and, above all, religion. Jewish religious thinking shaped Christianity (which started as a Jewish heresy and ultimately became the most widely diffused religion in the world). Later, Judaism deeply affected Islam. As we shall see, it pervaded Muhammad’s mind. In the long run, Christianity and Islam spread Jewish influence throughout the world. It seems astonishing that some followers of the three traditions should think they are mutually inimical, or be unaware of their shared ground.

  Christ, who died in about 33 ce, was an independent-minded Jewish rabbi, with a radical message. Some of his followers saw him as the culmination of Jewish tradition, embodying, renewing, and even replacing it. Christ, the name they gave him, is a corruption of a Greek attempt to translate the Hebrew term ha-mashiad, or Messiah, meaning ‘the anointed’, which Jews used to designate the king they awaited to bring heaven to earth, or, at least, to expel Roman conquerors from Jewish lands. Christ’s adherents were virtually the only recorders of his life. Many of their stories about him cannot be taken literally, as they derive from pagan myths or Jewish prophecies. His teachings, however, are well a
ttested, thanks to collections of his sayings recorded within thirty or forty years of his death. He made ferocious demands: a Jewish priesthood purged of corruption, the temple at Jerusalem ‘cleansed’ of moneymaking practices, and secular power forsaken for a ‘kingdom not of this world’. He upended hierarchies, summoning the rich to repentance and praising the poor. Even more controversial was a doctrine some of his followers attributed to him: that humans could not gain divine favour by appealing to a kind of bargain with God – the ‘Covenant’ of Jewish tradition. According to Jewish orthodoxy, God responded to obedience to laws and rules; Christians preferred to think that, however righteously we behave, we remain dependent on God’s freely bestowed grace. If Christ did say that, he broke new ground in ethics, expressing a truth that seems elusive until it is pointed out: goodness is only good if you expect no reward; otherwise, it is just disguised self-interest. No subsequent figure was so influential until Muhammad, the founder of Islam, who died six centuries later, and none thereafter for at least a thousand years.

  Sceptics sometimes claim that the great sages prescribed old magic rather than new religion: that efforts to ‘escape the world’ or ‘extinguish the self’ or achieve ‘union with Brahman’ were high-sounding bids for immortality; that mystical practice was a kind of alternative medicine designed to prolong or enhance life; or that prayer and self-denial could be techniques for acquiring the shaman’s power of self-transformation. The line between religion and magic is sometimes as blurred as that between science and sorcery. The Buddha called himself a healer as well as a teacher. Legends of the era associate founders of religions with what seem to be spells. Followers of Empedocles, for instance, who taught an obscure form of binarism in mid-fifth-century bce Sicily, importuned him for magical remedies for sickness and bad weather.12 Disciples often wrote of the sages, from Pythagoras to Christ, as miracle workers and though a miracle is not magic the one elides easily into the other in undiscriminating minds. Immortality, similarly, is not necessarily a worldly goal, but is conceivable in magic as the object of ensorcellment. Writings attributed to Laozi, who founded Taoism, make the point explicitly: the pursuit of immortality is a form of detachment from the world, amid the insecurities of life among the warring states. Disengagement would give the Taoist power over suffering – power, Laozi is supposed to have said, like that of water, which erodes even when it seems to yield: ‘Nothing is softer or weaker, or better for attacking the hard and strong.’13 Some of his readers strove to achieve immortality with potions and incantations.

  However much the new religions owed to traditional magic, they proposed genuinely new ways to adjust humans’ relationship with nature or with whatever was divine. Alongside formal rituals, they all upheld moral practice. Instead of just sacrificing prescribed offerings to God or gods, they demanded changes in adherents’ ethics. They beckoned followers by trailing programmes of individual moral progress, rather than rites to appease nature. They promised the perfection of goodness, or ‘deliverance from evil’, whether in this world or, after death, by transformation at the end of time. They were religions of salvation, not just of survival. Their ideas about God are the best place to begin a detailed examination of the new thinking they inspired.

  ‌Nothing and God

  God matters. If you believe in Him, He is the most important thing in or beyond the cosmos. If you don’t, He matters because of the way belief in Him influences those who do. Among the volumes the sages added to previous thinking about Him, three new thoughts stand out: the idea of a divine creator responsible for everything else in the universe; the idea of a single God, uniquely divine or divine in a unique way; and the idea of an involved God, actively engaged in the life of the world he created. We can take them in turn.

  In order to get your mind around the idea of creation, you have to start with the even more elusive idea of nothing. If creation happened, nothing preceded it. Nothing may seem uninteresting, but that, in a sense, is what is so interesting about it. It strains imagination more than any other idea in this book. It is an idea beyond experience, at the uttermost limits of thought. It is infuriatingly elusive. You cannot even ask what it is, because it isn’t. As soon as you conceive of nothing, it ceases to be itself: it becomes something. People who have been taught basic numeracy are used to handling zero. But zero in mathematical notation does not imply a concept of nothing: it just means there are no tens or no units or whatever classes of numbers happen to be in question. In any case, it appeared surprisingly late in the history of arithmetic, first known in inscriptions of the seventh century ce in Cambodia. Real zero is a joker in arithmetic: indifferent or destructive to the functions in which it appears.14

  Fittingly, perhaps, the origins of the idea of nothing are undetectable. The Upanishads spoke of a ‘Great Void’ and Chinese texts of around the middle of the first millennium bce referred to a notion usually translated as ‘emptiness’. But these seem to have been rather more than nothing: they were located in a space beyond the material universe, or in the interstices between the celestial spheres, where, moreover, in the Chinese writings, ‘winds’ stirred (though maybe we are meant to understand them metaphorically).

  Nonetheless, we know that the sages of the Upanishads had a concept of nonbeing, because their texts repeatedly poured scorn on what they saw as its pretended coherence. ‘How could it be’, sneered one scripture, ‘that being was produced from non-being?’15 Or as King Lear said to his daughter in Shakespeare’s play, ‘Nothing will come of nothing: speak again!’ Presumably, thinkers who postulated the ‘void’ were trying to explain motion, for how could anything move without resistance, except into nothingness? Most respondents rejected it for two reasons: first, the discovery of air in the gaps between objects cast doubt on the need to imagine the void; second, apparently invincible logic, as formulated in fifth-century bce Greece by Leucippus, objected, ‘The void is a non-being; and nothing of being is a non-being, for being, taken strictly speaking, is fully a being.’16 Still, once you have got your head around the concept of nothing, anything is possible. You can eliminate awkward realities by classifying them as nonbeing, as Plato and other idealists did with all matter. Like some of the modern thinkers who are called existentialists, you can see nothingness as the be-all and end-all of existence; the source and destination of life and the context that makes it meaningful. The idea of nothing even makes it possible to imagine creation from nothing – or more exactly the creation of matter from non-matter: the key to a tradition of thought that is crucial to most modern people’s religions.

  Most of the creation narratives encountered in the last chapter are not really about creation; they just seek to explain how an existing but different material cosmos came to be the way it is. Until the first millennium bce, as far as we know, most people who thought about it assumed that the universe had always existed. Ancient Egyptian myths we encountered in the last chapter describe a god who transformed inert chaos; but chaos was already there for him to work on. Brahman, as we saw, did not create the world out of nothing. He extruded it out of himself, as a spider spins its web. Though some ancient Greek poetry described genesis from nothing, most classical philosophy recoiled from the idea. Plato’s Creator-god merely rearranged what was already available. The Big Bang Theory resembles these early cosmogonies: it describes infinitesimally compressed matter, already there before the Bang redistributed it, expanding into the recognizable universe. In more radical attempts to explain creation scientifically, some protoplasm is there to be moulded, or electrical charges or disembodied energy or random fluctuations in a vacuum or ‘laws of emergence’.17 Creation from nothing seems problematical, but so does eternal matter, which, because change cannot happen without time, would be unchanging in eternity and would require some other, equally problematical agent to make it dynamic. Very rarely anthropology encounters creation myths in which a purely spiritual or emotional or intellectual entity preceded the material world, and matter began spontaneously, or was summ
oned or crafted out of non-matter. According to the Winnebago people of North America, for instance, Earthmaker realized by experience that his feelings became things: in loneliness, he shed tears, which became the primeval waters.18 On the face of it, the myth recalls the way Brahman produced the cosmos from himself, but we should not think of the tears literally: emotion in Winnebago lore was the source of the creative power that made the material world. For some ancient Greek sages, thought functioned in the same way. Indeed, feeling and thought can be defined in terms of each other: feeling is thought unformulated, thought is feeling, communicably expressed. The Gospel of St John borrowed from classical Greek philosophy to utter a mysterious notion of a world spawned by an intellectual act: ‘In the beginning was the Logos’ – literally, the thought, which English translations of the Bible usually render as ‘the Word’.

  The Gospel writer could fuse Greek and Jewish thinking, because the Old Testament (as commentators from the second half of the first millennium bce onward understood it) presented the earliest and most challenging creation-account of this kind: the world is a product of thought – no more, no less – exerted in a realm without matter, beyond being and nothingness. This way of understanding creation has gradually convinced most people who have thought about creation, and has become the unthinking assumption of most who have not.19