u. a".

. I31: . t

J

.fiu

.71

, x... .
4.3.x a...

79.:

y.

H...

in»?

a:
1:

«wwwwfiwxxruwfiwn»

I}:
.33.;-

 

x, 2...: .2
.97 :1
.3

 

 

 

 

$3. w raw. .

 

.9. . v
3.2.5...

33%)...“ .
V 1L.

I... A .
I I‘ 1,
. cut?

>A~:

‘ .

 

 

Millilll‘lll‘llilllllil

1293 01388 2240

_—r ‘
‘5 3
(3.“
V

This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled
SUFISM, TAOISM, AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON:
A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
ON THE RHETORIC OF THE PLACE BETWEEN

presented by

Leon Allen Raikes

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph . D . degree in Engl ish

 

é’ajor péfessor

Date October 12, 1995

 

MS U i: an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution 0-12771

   

 

H

H

 

II

 

LIBRARY
Michigan State
University

 

 

 

PLACE iN RETURN BOX to romovo this choekout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES Mum on or before date duo.

 

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSUIOM ‘5' ‘L ‘ ' j ' W ',irui'fiu‘uiun
W

ABSTRACT
SUFISM, TAOISM, AND RALPH WALDO EMERSON:
A CROSS-CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE
ON THE RHETORIC OF THE PLACE BETWEEN
By

Leon Allen Raikes

Conceiving of the tensions between the rhetorics of the east and west
metaphorically helps us to confront both the felt gulf between language and
learning and the conventionality of our theory. The gulf between language and life
is related to institutions, cultural diversity, creativity, and search for the truth. The
W is between active, logical categories of intelligence and receptive,
sensual categories of feeling; it has a prophetic intelligence which becomes real
only in finding a language for it.

The rhetoric and pedagogies of Sufism, Taoism, and Ralph Waldo Emerson
reveal a theory of the place between capable both of conforming and challenging
modern western theories of language and learning. The emrience of the place
between arrests time, instills a special kind of Zen stupidity, disdains
discursiveness, and animates all religion. The language of the place between
involves the speaker/writer more than the audience in a purposive disturbance of
conventional thinking. Tentative and questioning, the rhetoric of the place
between celebrates constant unsettling.

The rhetoric of Sufism explores beyond reasoning the home of the active
imagination, a real place between. The language of this place is indirect,

impersonal, dependent on surprise and symbol. An initiate brought beyond words

through words transcends the self, understands received culture as dead culture, is
creatively stimulated to doubt. The Sufi practices prayer as a reshaping of reality. '
Sufism creates for modern westerners key practical pedagogical imperatives.

Similarly, language in Zen practice enables transcendence of conditioning,
favors spontaneity over discursiveness, aims at clarity by a_v9i_di;1,g direct
affirmation, and cures scholastics of dependence on explanations.

A key guide into eastern rhetorical insights for westerners is Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Favoring not instruction but provocation, his rhetorical strategy gives
clear answers only to take them away. His assimilation of eastern influences helps
him to focus less on either logic or self expression and more on taking himself out

of time into the metaphorical place between.

 

 

 

Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my wife and family without whose patience and

support this work would never have been completed.

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the help and support of my dissertation committee: Dr.
Marilyn Wilson, chairperson and Drs. Kitty Geissler, Mike Lopez, and Jay Ludwig.
I also acknowledge the help and encouragement of my employer, Aquinas College
in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction—Joumeying to the Metaphorical East

Ancient Sufism and Modern English Education: A Vision
at the Connection of Divergent Cultures

Introduction

What is Sufism?

The Place Between

Knowledge, Literacy, and Cultural Relativity

Books, Recitation, and Prayer in Sufi Theory
and Practice

Empowering The Angels Within: Pedagogical
Implications

The Zen of English Education
A Note on Methods
O.K., But Why Zen?
THE NOW: A Unity of Thought and Action
Even After All the Above—More Theory?
East Meets West: A Historical Evolution?
Theoretical Aspects of Zen language

Language in Zen Practice

27

30

42

72

110

112

115

126

131

138

147

153

 

Towards a More Eastern Rhetoric for the
Western World

Further Tentative Conclusions

Emerson, Rhetoric, and the Centiimtence of
East and West

Introduction

Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Rhetoric of the
Place Between

Emerson, Rhetoric, and the Modernist Antithesis
Emerson, Rhetoric, and Eastern Antecedents

Emerson and the East from the Perspective of
Western Criticism

Emerson, Rhetoric, and the Future of Theory
and Practice

 

Conclusion

Bibliography

164

173

177

184

192

206

221

232

247

256

 

Introduction: Journeying
To the Metaphorical East
Picture my fear and confusion.

It was my first day of teaching. I had never taken an
education course in my life. I had figured that if ever I found myself teaching, I’d
just tell students what I knew. Now it didn’t seem so simple.

As I stood facing twenty-two Arabic-speaking teenagers in a small Lebanese
village, they stood facing me. Quickly I understood that, at least in every outward
way, teachers are far more venerated in other societies; students quickly rise when
the teacher enters and sit only when invited to do so.

Now what? I stood facing them. They stood facing me. I had received a
cordial introduction from the immense and affable Principal, who had admonished
my students to show me all due respect-J who had travelled several thousand
miles to the Military Zone just to help them learn English. But he was gone now.
What next?

For a few instants those words "Military Zone" made me a bit uncomfortable.
I glanced briefly out the classroom window, beyond the balcony, up to Mount
Hermon and beyond. I could see into three countries (Lebanon, Syria, and Israel);
I was very much a foreigner in at least Lgu_r, this great quiet classroom seeming the
biggest country of all.

I will never forget noting how many thoughts, all eloquently embodied in key

words, can go through a person’s mind in just the ten seconds before the inception

 

2
of actual speech. And how memorable is that silence before the speech of a
lifetime, the constellating and breathing of words in a calculated rhetorical act.

Exactly mt should I be saying to precisely these Lebanese teenagers—and

 

about the great tradition of English literature that I loved? Could these students
Ml! read Milton or "The Rape of the Lock"?

Vividly I remember that silence between, the flashback I saw so clearly in a
few seconds that involved a whole segment of my life.

Just two years earlier, as an undergraduate junior at Kalamazoo College, I had
been studying, as one of a handful of white students, at Fourah Bay College in
Sierra Leone. How I had loved my friends and our journeys to their homes in the
"bush"; but it was the classrooms I remembered nownone in particular: The
Political History of West Africa, or some such thing.

Let me picture the scene on a typical stifling hot morning. Having wandered
down the gorgeous paths, lined with oleander and dotted with whole bushes of
hybiscus, I entered the lecture hall--100 or more students in a lecture-style room
waiting for the professor to enter. By unfortunate custom, the white students sat
together near the front; others were from all over Africaumany countries and
many tribal groups—but all here to learn about their own political history.

Of course it was a history they knew about. They were living in it; during the
Biafran Civil War as it was, for example, Ibo and Yoruba ("enemies") sat in the
same room to learn about themselves.

The professor came in. She was a young white woman. She was an expert,

educated at a major British university. She lectured for ninety minutes while

3
everyone in the room took copious notes. Then we all went into the real world
again.

I asked my Ibo friend and neighbor in the dorm what he thought of all this.
He said the woman knew much. But did she teach him anything new? Well, the
woman knew much-and she had a degree from a great university. She had come
all the way to Africa to teach us.

She had come all the way....The Principal in Marjoyoun had said I had come
all the way....Was I going to become, had I already become, like that white
woman?

And I quickly remembered two other lessons at Fourah Bay College, though I
have forgotten almost everything I learned about political history. My favorite
course-and the one I had really come to takeawas a class on "primitive religion."
It was taught by a leader at the college, a respected scholar on Mende religion
particularly. He had written books. He knew about tribal customs. He was a wise
man.

He mg the six or eight of us in his class, speaking to us from long pages
of manuscript notes. The men had to wear ties; the women had to wear dresses.
He permitted no questions, expected no discussion, spoke as the authority.

He was a wise man.

Several weeks later, travelling with a friend a hundred miles into the jungle to
his village, I got to know my friend’s father, a famous Chief. The Chief had
twenty-three wives, ahnost a hundred children, a huge cocoa plantation, and a

marvelous little station wagon with a motor like a Singer sewing machine. He

 

spoke beautiful English.

He gave me, for a few weeks, my own house. And he said, "If you want to
know about our religion, come out on the night of the full moon and dance with
us. Then, if you have questions, come to me and as "

I danced all one night, along with the whole village, to the beat of giant drums
played with their entire forearms by huge men. People joked about me: "Now, if
he only learns the Mende language, he will be one of us." And I understood the
centrality of language in the cohesion and belongingness of groups that night in a
wholly new way.

And I asked the Chief many questions. He too was a very wise man.

The other lesson was shorter. Back in Freetown, I came out to watch a parade
on a festival day. Riding in the back seats of shining Mercedes were the Justices of
the Supreme Court—all large Black men. Each wore a very British powdered wig.

To be truthful, I struggled not to laugh at their absurd appearance, realizing
only a moment later the real import here: power, including the authority to decree

laws and judge issues affecting a whole country, and including the written aspects

 

of the law—all this power here was borrowed from a colonial system foreign to the
Sierra Leoneans I knew and loved.

But these too were wise men.

In any case, all this went through my mind quickly as I stood in front of my
ymmg Lebanese students-as they stood before me.

Somehow I remembered to ask them to be seated, and then, casting my voice

into an absolutely still well of stunned silence, I talked. I thanked them and the

 

5
village for inviting me to Lebanon. I talked about where I had been and what I
cared about. I talked about my love for literature which I hoped to share with
them. I talked about how I hoped to learn more and more about them and their
families, their aspirations for the future, their dreams.

Fortunately, no cross-border shelling went on that day. The silence was too
perfect between us by now, between the American teacher "who had come so far"
and the Lebanese scholars who were engaged in a fascinating ballet of furtive
glances and raised eyebrows among them.

They had not expected this. The wanted me to teach. My job, as they saw it,
was to tell them what they needed to know. Then they could study, memorize, and
pass the government exams. Those British exams—you know, the very ones given
to British teenagers twenty years beforenthose exams were looming.

Later, for many afternoons to come, I would watch pairs or small bands of
students marching up and down the courtyard of the small college memorizing
lessons, remembering verbag’m my oftentimes casual words (!).

At that moment I was not a wise man. They called me the "chatty professor."

Well, in the following years my behaviors became less overt but no less
my; I wanted my students to do well on the exams, of course; but I also
wanted them to think for themselves-really to have fresh ideas, say, about
Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us." I knew that such a text could
be meaningful to these students personally. Who could know more about the
tension between materialism and ancient spiritual values? Who could say more

about the differences between spending time making money or eating lunch for

 

three hours with a friend?

What I learned most in those years has not to do so much with pedago --
though I certainly had (and have) a lot to learn about techniques. Nor does what I
learned have chiefly to do with teaching English as a second language: I just kept
searching for ideas that work. It is true that my students taught me many things
about Shakespeare and Pope and Yeats and Dickinson, just as I hope they
learned fi'om me not only about literature but also about global issues-but even
all this is not chief among what I feel I have learned over the years of adjusting to
new societies and finally to various school cultures within America.

Whether in America or abroad there is for each student and each classroom a
key M between two cultures. Before I try to define what these cultures are or
what they have to do with various rhetorical behaviors (not to mention
pedagogical endeavors)-let me just visualize them first.

You can use simple labels to begin with if you wantuI’ve even created a chart

to which we can refer, understanding that eventually we may have to qualify or

perfect these labels:

West East

new old

intellectual/social intuitional/personal

mechanical spiritual

academic experiential

scholarly prayerful

a rhetoric of a rhetoric of

research (review) inseareh, here & now

adulthood childhood &lor
amiable old age

But let me share a memory first—again from the Lebanese border with Israel.

7
Thinking of this border, a no-man’s land between two worlds, always helps me to
visualize the gulf of which I will be speaking.

Picture a tall fence between two warring countries. There are harsh electric
lights at night. In the daytime vigilant patrols go up and down on both sides. No
one must cross this border going in either direction.

I remember standing at this place one spring day. First I looked into Israel
where "the desert bloomed." New olive trees were flourishing in beautifully-tended
groves on the greening hillsides. Straight and well-maintained roads organized the
landscape. Here there was every sign of careful planning, scientific inquiry and
discourse about planning and inquiry, and My of organization.

On "my" side, still in Lebanon, was a totally different scene, inspiring in a
different way. Ancient roadways meandered around hills, part of the timeless road
that once carried goods from Byblos or Tyre to Jerusalem or around Mount
Hermon to Damascus. Olive trees grew here as well, but mostly older ones
planted at random, never m rows. There was little planning or organizing here,
except for the organic patterning of nature left to her own designs.

The pom, you are asking? Well, it’s not so simple as a "point," but so far
these assertions might be made, tentative and subject to much more discussion:

(a) The worlds on the two sides of the fence are
both E.
(b)Bothrealworldsstruggletoberealizedin
each specific man and woman, whether coming at first from
the east or from the west.
(c) The tensions between or interplay between
these two world are thoroughly rhetorical.

(d) A global understanding of rhetoric and
complete picture of literacy education require a full

 

8

awareness of the real worlds on both sides of the
fence.

(e) The seeds of the understanding of each world
are scattered along the other side of the fence.

(f) ForthoseofusintheWest,wheremostlywe
prefer the straight rows and the new plants
scientificalb irrigated, m we may have about a
fuller or more global picture of discourse and literacy
education can be crystallized by study of eastern
rhetorics-even as most of us will remain thoroughly
western rhetoricians and researchers in the end.

For the purpose of further discussion—though of course warping the truth
somewhat while still working at a very general level-why not characterize western
vs. eastern rhetorical traditions a little more concretely?

We can begin by agreeing what is to be meant by rhetoric. Robert T. Oliver,
in his groundbreaking mutation and Culture 111' @g'ent India and China

(1971), prefers to quote Donald C. Bryant ("Rhetoric: Its Function and Its Scope,"
WM, December 1953): Rhetoric is "the function of
adjusting ideas to people and people to ideas." The usefulness of such a definition
is its dynamism: rhetoric m something, creating or redefining a relationship
among individuals. Rhetoric in this context defines or manipulates m within
certain situations. But its definition of reality is never absolute. Oliver,
significantly, adds to his working definition of rhetoric: rhetoric is the function of
adjusting ideas to people or people to ideas an_d rhetoric is the fimction of
adjusting mm (67)-

In the study and the use of rhetoric, reality is relative it is culturally relative,

 

in fact. Certainty is not the province of rhetoric; or, looked at another way, Truth

itself is relative. Again referring to Robert T. Oliver (6):

9
The ftmction of rhetoric is not, like dialectic, to examine a given
subject in order adequately to depict its nature. Nor is rhetoric, like
logic, designed to discover and demonstrate inevitable conclusions
about a subject. The province of rhetoric, as Aristotle pointed out, is
the realm of prob-abilities. We do not argue about that which is
certain or attainable; we try to persuade concerning propositions
which have alternative acceptable conclusions.

"Alternative acceptable conclusions"-but how many alternatives are acceptable
and in what range may be a cultural variable. If the province of rhetoric is neither
to define absolutely nor to absolutely define, it follows that rhetoric has to do with
areas of EhQiQ within human experience and how people may be influenced in

making these choices. What rhetoricians may do to influence choices, however, is

 

again relative: "The E ds of ideas that interest or move people and the reasons
W are not universals; they are specific attributes of
specific cultures" (7).

Of course some of these culture-specific attributes may be specific indeed. But
for the sake of discussion only, here a rough distinction is being made between the
very general categories "east" and "west." Understand at the outset that these
designations are not meant to be geographical. That is, eastern aspects of rhetoric
may be alive and well in the geographical west (among those for whom the east is
a particular study or among those, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, for whom the east
has acted as a kind of influence or m for spontaneous intellectual or spiritual
ideas). likewise, increasingly, western predispositions in rhetoric are likely to be
more and more influential in the east, especially among expanding market
economies. I speak of dichotomies tentatively and personally, all in an effort to

help us western thinkers rise beyond our own already-achieved categories.

10
The M and the west are metaphors. Both are alive in each of us.
Yet it is the metaphorical west that rules us pedagogically; it has defined the
limits of how we see literacy and the very rhetorical stance of literacy education.
Robert T. Oliver, like almost everyone else describing the origins of what is
western in western rhetoric, calls us back to Plato in the famous passage from
Ems-gm, where he has Socrates say the following on how we may define rhetoric:
The conditions to be filled are these. First, you must know the truth
about the subject you speak or write about; that is to say, you must
be able to isolate it in definition, and having so defined it, you must
understand how to divide it into kinds, until you reach the limit of
division; secondly, you must have a corresponding discernment of
the nature of the soul, discover the type of speech appropriate to
each nature, and order and arrange your discourse accordingly,
addressing a variegated soul in a variegated style that ranges over
the whole gamut of tones, and a simple soul in a simple style. All
this must be done if you are to become competent, within human
limits, as a scientific practitioner of speech, whether you propose to
expound or persuade. (Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds.
flhg Collectfl Dialogues of Plato. New York, 1961, 522-523)

Embedded in this famous passage is almost everything western about the
western traditions of rhetoric. (a) You must "know the truth about your subject"
m you write or speak about it; only relatively recently have western rhetorics
allowed that one may write, in that very process, to first learn about the subject.
(b) You must "divide [your subject] into kinds," classifying and categorizing,
dissecting and analyzing—all very useful (but also, as we shall see, distorting or
restricting as well). (c) Order and arrange your discourse in certain patterns which
can be learned, practiced, and ingrained.

In the west, rhetoric has been a study to help people to get a job done.

To show how all the above distinguishes western rhetorical theory and practice

 

11

from my; theory and practice, Robert T. Oliver is once again the best source--
also in his seminal work Comunication and Culture m‘ Ancient India mid China,
focused on attitudes to rhetoric. For sure, several centuries of rhetorical study in
the west have produced a vast and varied literature on the study of rhetoric; "the
west has been intoxicated with eloquence and the means of attaining it" (9-10). In
ancient India and China, on the other hand, Oliver asserts that the bibliography is
very slim indeed on the subject of rhetoric. But it is Oliver’s mlanation of these
facts which is so important here:

To state the matter most simply, in the West rhetoric has been

considered to be so important that it has had to be explored and

delineated separately, as a special field of knowledge about human

relations. In the East, rhetoric has been considered so important that

it could not be separated from the remainder of human knowledge

(10).

Let’s look at the above facts and perspectives in a little more concrete way. I
am reminded by Oliver of the lovely distinction Antoine de Saint-Exupery makes
in the early pages of his The Little Prince. First he shows that he takes rhetorical
acts very seriously:

For I do not want anyone to read my book carelessly. I have

suffered too much grief in setting down these memories. Six years

have already passed since my friend went away from me, with his

sheep. If I try to describe him here, it is to make sure that I shall

not forget him. To forget a friend is sad. Not everyone has had a

friend. And if I forget him, I may become like the grown—ups who

are no longer interested in anything but figures (18-19).
De Saint-Exapery must write his memories down in order not to lose them—but
aho in order not to be changed into a merely reasoning and logical adult person

"no longer interested in anything but figures." At the same time, in his rhetorical

 

12
sophistication, he knows that he has to reach those adults (those westerners) too;
if h'n audience were only children, that would change the way he tells the stog,
meaning that there are two distinct rhetorics involved. To only children he could
say, "The proof that the Little Prince existed is that he was charming, that he
laughed, and that he was looking for a sheep. If anybody wants a sheep, that is
proof that he exists." But grown-ups and western rhetoricians who grew up cheek
to jowl with the Greeks will want another treatment before being satisfied: "The
planet he came from is Asteroid B-612." Oh well, then: they would be convinced.

Here is how the author would have liked to begin his story-but this would
only work for readers who are comfortable with the idea that fairy tales are true:

Once upon a time there was a little prince who
lived on a planet that was scarcely bigger than
himself, and who had need of a sheep...

You see the problem.

119 issue here is the basic issue about what is real and how a person can talk
Mi; Robert T. Oliver and others explain that in the east, universally, writers
and thinkers are devoted to the "related concepts of unity and harmony":

In this view all things properly belong together and coexist.
Consequently, the ancient East has not been much interested in
logic, which necessarily correlates unlike elements, nor has it favored
either definition or classification as aids to clear thought (10).
Plato’s way of first knowing the truth about a subject and then dividing it "into
kinds" is a foreign way of thinking. In fact, as Oliver too implies, clear thought
itself (as the west defines it) is not of particular value in the east:

Whereas the West has favored analysis and division of subject
matter into identifiable and separate entities, the East has believed

 

13
that to see truth steadily one must see it whole. (Oliver 10)
If, in the process, "outlines are dimmed" (10), such a "loss" is more than
compensated by the varied gains of "viewing the subject in its interrelated entirety"
(10).

If your effort is to define a certain aspect of what you call real, a certain
rhetoric will provide you the tools. You will classify, characterize, clarify. You will
make distinctions and pm; your definitions true if your readers or listeners
accept your categories. On the other hand, if your purpose is to unify, describe,
exemplify, you will need other rhetorical tools. You will see intellectual categories,
no matter how carefully logical, as comfortable abstractions or damaging
delusions. Your philosophy of rhetoric, if you choose to develop one, will focus not
so much on clarity, proof, and consistency for the sake of an audience-rather it
will focus more on discovery, tentativeness, expressiveness, and inconsistency M
W-

You need to choose between a rhetoric of ideas which is persuasive and rather
definite g; a rhetoric of insights which is necessarily continuous and M-

Such approaches to rhetoric, then, seem at first almost mutually exclusive. One
wonders if it is possible to speak about one world fi'om the perspective of another.
Yet we must remember that there is just this one world, and even in westem-
dominated research westerners have developed various ways of talking about its
unity.

Especially westerners—fond, you see, of classifying and dividing and defining

thing in formal outline-especially westerners need to be reminded const_agty that

 

14

there is but one world. Think of Carlos Castaneda in the first of the books about
Don Juan (1968), fire Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge;
Carlos is a chatty degree candidate who is obsessed with taking notes. The only
discourse he knows is academic: he is in the process of inventing a dissertation,
sifting through and constantly reorganizing pages of notes. Under Don Juan’s
tutelage and especially under the influence of the hallucinogens associated with
Don Juan’s instruction about becoming a "man [sic] of knowledge," Carlos enters
and retr‘eats--enters a "separate reality” and then returns to "this world." He begins
to think that he experiences two worlds, and he is torn between them. Here are
Don Juan’s words, his rhetorical effort to teach:

You think there are two worlds for you-two paths. But there is only

one....The only world available to you is the world of men, and that

world you cannot choose to leave. You are a man! The protector

[Mescalito] showed you the world of happiness where there is no

difference between things because there is no one there to ask about

the difierence. But that is not the world of men. The protector

shook you out of it and showed you how a man thinks and fights.

M is the world of man. And to be a man is to be condemned to

that world. You have the vanity to believe you live in two worlds,

but that is only your vanity. There is but one single world for us. We

are men and must follow the world of men contentedly (152-153).

The way of knowledge, the "path with heart," while not a road down which
one can talk oneself, is a road on which descriptions and simple instructions and
even metaphorical explanations can help a "man of knowledge" discipline and
clarify himself. His metoric borrows fiom both east and west: from "east" the
ritual repetition, the subtle suggestion, the unitary vision, the assertion of the
oneness of all things; from the "west", the ability to offer at least partial

explanations, if only so that apprentices of the future may follow. Note that

 

15
Castaneda appends, to this very first volume, a different treatment of all the same
material, but this time labelled "Structural Analysis." His western desire to explain
and categorize is over-riding.
Teachers of some variety of spiritual knowledge in various cultural traditions,
while relying on language to instruct apprentices in a knowledge that essentially
goes beyond explanations, bring students of rhetoric face to face with the mystery

and the key paradox of language. While we can be inspired by Don Juan’s words--

For me there is only the travelling on the paths that have a heart, or

any path that may have a heart. There I travel, and the only

worthwhile challenge for me is to travel its full length. And there I

travel—looking, looking breathlessly (185).
—the question remains, how do we fl about or define or demonstrate or describe
this walking on the path? What indeed is the path? How can I express my
experiences of it to even one other person? Could I hope to do so definitively?
The question is how to Q]; about insightful experiences without at the same time
killing them.

Stimulating a great deal of thought on these questions, Toby Fulwiler, in his
W refers to Georges Gusdorf in the section on "Thought and
Language." In 1977 Gusdorf analyzed the "double and often contradictory role" of
our language in personal development. We communicate ideas and facts to other
people-often we get very good at this in schools; m we use language to express
ourselves, to discover ourselves to ourselves, to reveal ourselves spiritually. As

Fulwiler puts it, the two roles—"communicative" and "expressive"--may often seem

16
to oppose each other. Quoting Gusdorf directly now, "The more I communicate,
the less I express myself; the more I express myself, the less I communicate" (in
Fulwiler 3).

The writer’s dilemma, then, and the cross-cultural challenge in the study of
rhetoric through the ages, is it not m to express oneself and define concepts at
the same time? How can I help you to understand without losing my own identity
in the categories of discourse I must use in order to be understood? How can I
discover and use a rhetoric of personal reflection without sounding, in my speech,
either simply crazed and incoherent or, even in my careful speech, nonetheless
anti-intellectual?

And please note how the m of this particular discourse is beginning to
hinge decisively on dualities, opposites, dichotomies-or their real or invented or
eventual unity. Is this imagery, once again, not the m of the larger image
throughout of the "east" and the "west"?

Yet another gems; way of "defining," from a western perspective, the
metaphorical distinction between east and west is to note the differing M
m in which rhetoric happens. Whereas the west, formed in its rhetorical
ideas by Plato, Aristotle, and Periclean speech-making, focuses on persuasion, such
is much less the case in the east. Throughout the east there is very little lecture
tradition, no long tradition of political debate, no love of eloquence for its own
manipulative sake (Oliver 1-2), no eternal worry about sophism. Rather, the
eastern traditions focus on declamation, recitation, prayer, inner search, and subtle

innuendo. Yet in daily life, as at all times in all places, the rhetorical issues may

 

17
not be as overtly philosophical as I make them seem.
The key to understanding the Asian mind and Asian civilization is
their manner of talk: how they addressed one another and why,
under what circumstances, on what topics, in what varied styles, with
what intent, and with what effects? (Oliver 2-3)

It should be clear by now that "east" and "west," "the rhetoric of the east" and
the ”rhetoric of the west"--all are terms that absolutely do not exist absolutely. We
can use these terms only metaphorically, loosely, carefully in relationship to each
other. Referring back to the chart (above) of "east" vs. "west," surely you can see
that no single personnnor a whole culture-is likely to be isolated on one side.
Rather we could begin to regard these as competing sets of energies. Real people,
as well as whole populations, are no doubt drawn in two directions at once.

So?

It is the felt gulf between, the silence as it were between the beating of the
angels’ wings, that I want to ask about. How could we learn a new or clearer
vision for our study of rhetoric or for the pedagogies of literacy by standing in the
s1] ence between? How can insights acquired in this study help us to define a
rhetoric of spiritual, personal discovery in an age not characterized by prophecy or
revelation? How could a person’s own v_vo_rd_s help a new future unfold?

New future, you say? Redundant? I mean a future which is not a
reconstruction of somebody else’s time shaped even by identical forces. I’m
talking about our ability (or not) to intervene in history. I’m talking about bridging
the gulf.

But most of us, western academics or those under the influence of western

18
intellectual-rhetorical tradition especially, remain imprisoned in a strict duality. We
suffer from this duality on several layers because we know intuitively a gulf
between parts of ourselves.

Let me explain what I mean by such a duality.

First, teachers and students both will easily understand the Log dimensions of
this duality. It is experienced as a gulf between two lives. We enjoy an intellectual
life and, outside the academy, a personal life. If we are artists, we are always
struggling with the perceived dissonance between the art and the life. Often there
is so little time for the art, and entirely too much routine personal lived
experience. Or we wish we had a greater share of time for writing poems, novels,
articles, or plays and a lesser share of time for grading students’ essays or cooln'ng
the evening meal or driving Emily to swimming practice.

Don’t students experience this duality too?

In fact, it may torture them more deeply than it does us. They ask, "What do
these lectures and studying for these tests and doing the research (whatever that
is) have to do with me?"

Of course many students don’t ask these questions. They remind me of an
article by David Batholomae ("Inventing the University" in Mike Rose, ed., m
A an Qg’g Write). Batholomae claims that in writing for us students seek to
join our discourse community-they "reinvent the University." Yet writing will be
required mm the intellectual skills are learned. Hence the student voice
mimicking authority, the hollow bluffs. The problem of audience awareness

becomes, for our students, enormously complicated when they are subject to a

 

19
language they can neither command nor control. If "learning," at least as it is
defined in the h'beral arts curriculum, becomes more a matter of imitation and
parody than a matter of "invention and discovery" (143), this is another way of
saying that large groups of students are denied access to literacy in the very setting
in which we say they are gaining access to literate traditions. The environments in
which we may place our students (like the land of "administered thought" in
Richard Ohmann’s picture of Comp 101) may actually gm development in
literacy.

Many of us are so used to duality, to the sensation of leading more than one
life, that we stop noticing such dissonance. And it is far more convenient to ignore
it (that relatedduality) in our students.

What can we do to regain an experience of the whole life again? How can we
give a greater gift to students—especially those of us who teach in English and
writing and humanities departments-«he gift of wholism, a meaning for the
academic dimensions of life, a reason for colleges and universities as institutions?

We will not find as many clues as we expect to the answers for these questions
in our own research only. To let "the academy" examine itself academically to
reform the academy could go on inconclusively for generations. It would be rather
like a sick patient trying to talk himself or herself out of being sick in purely
medical terms. A new conceptual universe would be required, and a new
vocabulary. Perhaps even a miracle.

Fortunately, we do not have to wait for miracles. In our own research on

language and literacy in the last few decades are the seeds of our salvation—the

 

 

20
seeds scattered on the other side of the fence.

I often feel that I have to see something a new way. Intuitively I see that I will
not understand better an issue, a problem, a hem in the fabric of reality, by using
the vocabulary or the conceptual categories already in my possession. I will have
to step outside myself. Then I remember Fritjof Capra in his Tao of Physics and
how, quoting the early twentieth century physicist Werner Heisenberg, he justified
his will to compare unlike things:

It is probably quite true generally that in the history of human
thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at the
points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may
have their roots in quite different parts of human culture, in
different times or different environments or different religious
traditions: hence if they actually meet, that is if they are at least so
much related to each other that a real interaction can take place,
then one may hope that new and interesting developments may
follow.
Bringing apparently dissimilar conceptual or experiential universes into the
neighborhood of each other develops light and heat: illumination and imaginative
energy.
Thatiswhatl’m goingtotrytodohere.

Doing so makes the topics I organize and the language I use in this discourse
quite Dim- If I create metaphors centering on the Sufi tradition of the rhetoric
of enlightenment, or the associated Zen tradition, or the example of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, I do so in a personal way. You could only expect me to draw from what
I him-if by m we mean both intellectual conviction and experiential certainty.

I offer one way of thinking about the questions listed below; each reader will also

 

21
have to draw from personal experience-no matter what continent, metaphorically,
or what historical epoch is most personal to him or to her.

In planning a journey of just this type, it must be understood that there are no
definite maps. Maps delineate a linear journey precisely in terms of the map.
Arriving at a destination happens in terms of the map. Here the awkwardness is in
using a map but then changing the language and the strategy of the map before
arriving when, in terms of where we wish to go, the language of the map no longer
identifies where we are reaching. To arrive at an understanding of the
metaphorical east in western rhetoric will mean looking at the blurred but vital
landscape just under the one we already know about on our western map. It will
mean subverting and resisting all along the way.

Similarities we may find among divergent "traditions"-Sufism, Zen, the works
of Ralph Waldo Emerson-will not make sense if looked at reasonably in terms of
mm. It is unlikely that medieval Sufis, for example, were influenced by
knowledge of contemporary developments in far-away Zen. Nor would it be easy—
nor even useful except in terms of a merely intellectual history-to prove how or
how much Emerson was influenced by either Sufism or Zen-like (mostly earlier
Hindu) writings. What we have to find is more general, more universal features of
a rhetorical landscape-a landscape we can associate with the metaphorical east.
This may be a landscape that we already know, though not distinctly-one which
we can ignore—just under the features of our western map. It is a real language,
nonetheless, and one the exploration of which potentially restores to us the non-

dual and a richness of discourse which h’berates the spirit. It will also res'mt and

 

22
subvert the assumptions about rhetoric which we already feel more comfortable to
have made.

All this is therefore not so much about Sufism, Zen, or Emerson as it is, right
now, about u_s.

What calls me is a certain spirit of journeying-you know, the kind of
journeying when you wake up on a clear, cool day knowing that you want to
wander now, perhaps for many days. You eat a good meal, put on your most
comfortable old shoes, pitch a few snacks into a bag, and away you go. If someone
asks where you are going, you say 'kvherever my feet might be taking me." And
you mean it. Not knowing too clearly exactly what to expect or how your trek will
end up is part of the adventure.

But if you’re taking readers along, you have necessarily an added weight of
responsibility. Being in this circumstance myself, there follow certain defining lists
or classifications. While such lists or classifications mightan the standpoint of
an adventurer—keep us from exploring many interesting sideroads and deep gullies
branching down to the river, at least we know we will get home for Christmas.

And, as searching leads to searching, we can always come back for other journeys

for many years to come.

(l) m in this discourse include: (a) the definition of literacy is
necessarily m whether you like to define literacy that way or not; (b)
western research on literacy and western rhetorical predispositions which shape

that research are extremely likely to be ethno-centric (just as is the eastern

 

23

perspective on western life and letters); (c) multiple perspectives on language and
learning, imaginatively created, can act on us as missile-like lectures of the Lshi,
with equally unsettling-of-the-world-as-we-view—it results; ((1) having become
tmsettled, we can come face to face creatively with the conventionality of our own
thinking—we will see ourselves revealingly; (e) engaging in this long-term joumey-
into-other—people’s-ways—of-making—meaning actively can help us, in practical
terms, to understand what to do about practical pedagogical problems; (f) having

some fresh ideas about what to do we can try that doing before starting the whole

 

process all over again. We will find that there is really no end to the journeying.

Why follow exactly @ path up the mountain? The Sufi insight is an insight of
personal discovery, endless prayer, recitation; the rhetoric of personal revelation is
complete submission to God. The words are a way Mo—nd the language, beyond
the self, straight to God. The Zen insight I take to be related to the Way of the
Sufi, but even more personal, even more remarkable in its involvement with
words. Its enlightenment is said to be an enlightenment beyond language using
language to point the way. And Ralph Waldo Emerson’s insight was a way of
drawing intuitively from extra-Christian mystical traditions even without completely
entering those traditions. His search to balance the Intellect and the Spirit, Jesus
and the Buddha, the society and the self convictingly prefigures the search for
balance which calls many twentieth century researchers in several fields, in many
countries, to look both east and west within. All that follows, as I recreate my own

path up the mountain, is meant to be an extended answer to the question: what

 

24
does attention to the rhetorical subtleties of these traditions add or confirm in an
already prevalent quest in western research to address these issues?
Certain issues—there are scores of these, but I mean here to focus on the
following:

(1) How can an attempt to see more global issues in the study of rhetoric
help us to face the conventionality of our own thoughts about language?

(2) More specifically, what might a study of Sufi traditions teach us (or
confirm in us) about pedagogy or about the language of personal reflection?

(3) What unique insights might a study of rhetoric in the Zen tradition also
contribute to the same study?

(4) How can a perspective on the unique achievements of Ralph Waldo
Emerson that focuses on his intuitive crossing of cultures teach us about modern
approaches to global diversity?

(5) In all the above cases, how does a rhetoric of explanations and
clarifications transform itself into a rhetoric of revelation by shocking, surprising,
or irritating people into greater awareness?

(6) How might learning all the above constructively and meaningfully affect
practical pedagogical methods?

Tentative answerings to these questions will involve the following methods:

(a) m a general survey of Sufism, Zen or Taoism, and the works
of Ralph Waldo Emerson m a study of restricted texts;

(b) Purposive looks at differing ideas or perspectives in order to
Cindy what, in isolation, might be more obscure;

 

 

25
(c) Always a focus and a concentration on how newly global
perspectives on English education could enhance learning;
((1) Simultaneous research, in a western sense, and insearch, in an
eastern sense;

(e) An equal respect for both sides of the fence.

What do I think it will come down to if you travel with me? We will go
together, with this one over-arching question in mind, though not expecting a final
answer, nonetheless realizing in an extended way the usefulness of asking

impossible questions:

What is, finally, the role of rhetoric in seeking

the Truth?

If, especially as westerners, we begin to define the Truth as unfinished,
incomplete, and therefore inexpressible as definition, what is the useful and
ultimate role of intellect alone in relation to achieved intuition? Can there, in our
own times, be a rhetoric of spiritual insearch which is not only a talking flu; but
also a talking mm perceived truth? How can an understanding of such a
potential rhetorical reality contribute to sound and successful teaching practices?
How can a study of the rhetoric of personal revelation in ancient-and-also-living,
non-western traditions (even among western writers) help us to conceptualize and

to meaningfully practice a rhetoric of personal insearch in a modern secular age?

 

26
There follow three related extended essays-~on Sufism, on Zen or Taoism, and
on Ralph Waldo Emerson-centering in general on a rhetoric of personal
transformation and prayerful or poetic speech. None of these essays is meant to
be definitive or final; they are more like goadings toward further thought and
practice. Each essay is a personal exploration, the writing of which has shaken and
challenged my own ideas about rhetoric, literacy, and pedagogy to the extent of

personal crisis.

 

Ancient Sufism and Modern English Education:
A Vision at the Connection of Divergent Cultures

u 'on
The Watermelon Hunter

Once upon a time there was a man who strayed, from his
own country, into the world known as the Land of Fools. He soon
saw a number of people flying in terror from a field where they had
been trying to reap wheat. ’There is a monster in that field,’ they
told him. He looked, and he saw that it was a watermelon. He
ofiered to kill the ’monster’ for them. When he had cut the melon
from its stalk, he took a slice and began to eat it. The people
became even more terrified of him than they had been of the melon.
They drove him away with a pitchforks crying, ’He will kill us next,
unless we get rid of him.’ It so happened that another time another
man also strayed into the land of fools, and the same thing started
to happen to him. But, instead of offering to help them with the
’monster,’ he agreed with them that it must be dangerous, and by
tiptoeing away from it with them he gained their confidence. He
spent a long time with them in their houses until he could teach
them, little by little, the basic facts which would enable them not
only to lose their fear of melons, but even to cultivate them
themselves. (Shah 207-08)

Sufism, an uncodified body of practices of teaching and learning in a broader
tradition of Islamic mysticism-seems far removed in time and place from the
modern English classroom. Yet Sufi attitudes and practices have helped maintain,
for "literate" and "non-literate" Muslims alike, a theory of knowledge that serves
well even to the present day. Sufism has no single satisfactory definition; no single
theory of teaching and learning has ever been codified. Its "truth without form"
(Shah 202) is reborn and modified in each successive generation of learners and
teachers who seek together "attainment."

W. The m of repeating the search for ultimate

27

 

28
definitions in a system recognizing cultural and historical relativity will make
possible the ggtjy'tim through which we may reach our goals in spite of ourselves.
What could the Islamic mystics of all ages teach us, from their rich heritage of
research on language and learning, about the directions in which our best thoughts
on English education are moving? What could they have to do with us? Travelling
into their realm may help us to achieve an objective distance from our own
cultural assumptions regarding teaching and learning. Sufi meditations on teaching
and learning can help us to define tentative answers to key issues:
”What is Sufism?
“What is theplace between in Sufi theory ofknowing
and wlnt could this have to do with us?
l”From the Sufi perspective, what assessments might be
made concerning knowledge, literacy, the role of
language in learning, and cultural relativity?
“What can we learn from the Sufi vision of learners?
”What can we learn from the Sufi vision of teachers?
”What can we learn from the Sufi vision of
institutions?
“What aspects of Sufi teaching and learning could help
us redefine, for modern westerners, a rhetoric of

creative personal discovery?

Only quite lately, perhaps, have we begun to teach the way the second man

 

29
does in "The Watermelon Hunter," guided as we have been by a great body of
research on English education spanning several decades. That is, we begin from
the student and go from there, not always pretending to preconceive the eventual
outcomes yet maintaining fidelity to our theories about literacy, literature, and
education. We respect the various cultures in which we are called upon to
operate.

As we shall see, this is very much in keeping with the ancient Sufi ideas about
learners: learners are at different stages of "attainment," they come to learn for
vastly different reasons out of different cultural and social contexts, and they have
very particular needs which teachers can gradually address in a community of
"initiates" or learners.

The community in flux is the central metaphor of Sufi teaching: "Teachers in
one circle become pupils in another" ("Themes for Solitary Contemplation" in
Shah 232). Learning is always under way for all. The real subject of education is
how we know. And in this process we need each other. Within this mystic
tradition, then, there is less ascetisicm or scholasticism than we might expect.
There is only the ever-renewed opportunity for learning in ordered, rigorously
contemplated communities.

Sufi themes of contemplation are foreshadowed in the following passage from
a Sufi notebook (Shah 231-32):

Sufism is a study which is not scholastic. Its materials are taken from
almost every form of human experience. Its books and pens are in
the environment and resemble nothing that the scholastic or

enthusiast ever dreams about. It is because recitations, effort and
books are included in this kind of study, and because Sufi teacher

 

30

are called ’Teacher,’ that the fact of specialized communication has
become confused with academic or imitative study.

As in an enlightened vision of English education in our own era, the key
questions have to do with a definition of literacy, the role of print in knowledge-
making, the relationship of teachers and learners, and knowing as related to the
wider world. The central questions revolve around what seekers of knowledge do.
As Paulo Friere said in a conversation with Ira Shor, "While education is not the
lever for social transformation, nevertheless transformation is an educational
event" (Shor and Friere 134). It is therefore not too romantic or unrealistic to
imagine that we might be shocked into recognition of a vision for the twenty-first
century by looking deeply into the past within a tradition of personal and social
transformation. At the very least, doing so can create a sort of Sufi metaphor for
English education in the modern era.

By looking from outside in, from afar, we may see the whole picture. I have
taken another contemplation theme as my own guide (Abu Said in Shah 219):
"Being a Sufi is to put away what is in your head—imagined truth, preconceptions,

conditioning-and to nice what may happen to you."

t Sufis

While it has been singularly difficult to define Sufism throughout the ages-for
reasons which will become more and more clean-there has been no dearth of
attempts, even among Sufis themselves. Some of these definitions, while useful,

seem almost too general to be clear. For example, Arberry refers to Sufism as "the

 

31
mystical movement of an uncompromising monotheism" (12). Victor Danner, in
the introduction to his translation of Ibn ’Atta’lllah’s The k of Wisdo
provideshis own simple definition: "a body of teachings and methods having the
love and knowledge of God as their goal" (9). Or a modem-day Sufi—Salma Al-
Faqih I-Iassen in SEQ—insists that what distinguishes a Sufi from those for whom
love and gnosis are separate paths is the belief that "knowledge is an outcome of
love and visa versa" (6).

Yet none of these attempts to define the Sufis as Islamic mystics comes even
close to distinguishing the special flavor of Sufi belief and practice from other
mystical traditions—or even from the doctrine of Islam generally. And such
distinctions must be made in order to show how Sufism, and Sufism in particular,
can help modern westerners gain insights about the development of their own
rhetoric of personal insight.

Furthermore, the Sufis must be rescued from the popular stereotype of
"whirling" dervishes, the so called "intoxicated" Sufis. As John Renard, 8.1., is quick
to point out in his introduction to Ibn ’Abbad’s Letters on the Sufi Path the
"sober" trends are the important ones in the study of Sufism, not the dancing
dervishes or the "weird feats like piercing limbs with knives" in occasional
degenerate communities throughout the Islamic world; the "sober" schools still
exist today (x-xi).

Nor must we take the easy way out, as others have preferred to do. To quote
the Sufi tradition generally and Ibn el-Jalili in particular, "Sufism is truth without

form" (in Shah 222). Of course it is Truth, or at least a search for Truth; all

 

 

32
gnosticism is that. But the "without form" part is Sufic indeed—the suggestion
being that, far from being Absolute, the truth is relative, adaptive, evolving,
perhaps even whatever you make it.

Most westerners will want to know more, arguing that merely to define Sufism
as "truth without form" is really no definition at all. They will not be pleased for
sure with some suggestions which identify Sufism not just with Islam but even with
a kind of trans-historical, cross-cultural universalism; Selma al-Faqih Hassen
referred to Sufism (in 1971) as "the truth in all religions" (3). Thinking also of
Sufism as ”truth without [fixed] form," she wrote of a kind of Sufism adjusted to
various times and places; she asserted that Sufis existed long before the birth of
Mohamed and that in the Time of Jesus they were the Essenes, including John
the Baptist (4).

It is also Salma al-Faqih Hassen who quotes Hujwari on her very next page:
"To the Sufi the meaning of Sufism is clearer than the Sun and does not need an
explanation or indiwfion" (5).

Hujwari’s meaning in this context, though, is very important; knowledge (of
God) requires only direct apprehension. The meaning of Sufism is "clearer than
the sun," no fl between. This is so even if the m of men and women M
understand; in seeking for explanations they fail to find anything. The Sufis are th_e
m-as Hassen reminds us, "the foremost." And, like almost every other
commentator on Sufism, she quotes the Qoran (2:182): "When my servants inquire
of thee concerning me tell them I am near" (16).

Therefore, another traditional way to define who the Sufis are is to say simply

 

33
that they are "Those who are Near" (Iings, Twentieth gay! 38). In another
place tings quotes Junayd (the "shaikh of shaikhs" himself) this way: "Sufism is
that God should make thee die away from thyself and live in Him" (W_hat_Is;
Sufism? 108).
That’s Near.

A tradition of the Sufis themselves refers to the need to define Sufism,
showing that in their view such a need developed only as times changed, as people
lived at a distance in time and place from the Revelations of Muhammad himself,
and as a kind of worldliness came between people and God-completely disrupting
the m for which the Sufis are famous. Martin Lings, like many others,
quotes Abu ’l-Hassan Fushanji (10th century): "Today Sufism is a name without a
reality. It was once a reality without a name." Hujwari, about a century later,
commented this way (and has been quoted ever since): "In the time of the
Companions of the Prophet and their immediate successors this name [Sufism] did
not exist, but its reality was in everyone. Now the name exists without the reality"
W192 45).

The point is: if you need to fit what Sufism is, you will not be able to know.
It is like Louis Armstrong’s famous comment in our own century; when asked
after his concerts "What is Jazz?" he replied, "Man, if you gotta ask, you’ll never
know" (In Kennedy iii).

Such a m of unwillingness consciously to define terms or to develop
commentaries or to codify teachings accounts for the M growth of Sufi

expression in literature-especially since, according to Austin in his introduction to

34
Ibn ’Arabi’s The Sufis of Andalusia, "emphasis was on personal contact between
disciples and master" (51). Certain key issues that need further discussion follow
from these facts: (a) the relationship between teachers and learners was very
much thought out among Sufi practitioners; (b) spoken language gained far more
respect than written discourse, at least at first; and (c) the need for lots of talking
and especially reading and writing is a sure sign that people of the way have lost
their am to God—books fill in where direct knowledge has failed. Tings (in
his introduction to Sufi ' t of the entieth tu ) quotes an AJ. Arberry
translation of a famous saying from the tenth century Sufi of Bukhara, a woman
named Kalabadhi: "Then [after the second generation of Islam] desire diminished
and purpose flagged; and with this came the spate of questions and answers,
books and trea ' " (43).

Those of us in the bookish West may wonder at such reticence, such concern
about the relatively low regard the Sufis seem to have for personal expression
even though their personal expressions are in many cases so numerous and
impressive. Why do the Sufis seem to prefer not to regard writing, especially
careful analysis and commentary, as a desirable part of the path to Knowledge?

Martin Lings, in his chapter on the "Origins of Sufism" answers that question
in the clearest possible way. He makes a distinction between inspiration and
Mon in Qoranic, and especially Sufi, tradition. iration is "like a spark
struck from a flint"—the flint being man and the striker God. But revelation means
a'sparksu'uckbyGodfi'omM.TherranisrevealedbyGod, notinany

way as an expression of ideas or feelings by the Prophet himself (34-35). It is

 

35
important in these cases to be reminded, once again, in fact, that Muhammed is
not a son of God In Islamic theology: he is (only) the messenger.

It is clear, then, in many ways that, however we may wish to try to define
Sufism, the Sufis themselves reject utterly the categories of western rational
philosophy. Most understanding commentators on Sufi masters find themselves,
likewise, arguing against judging the Sufis by these same categories. R.W.J. Austin,
8.1., in introducing Ibn ’Arabi’s Bezels of Wisdom, asserts:

Western scholars have too often tried, rather unsuccessfully, to judge

him [Ibn ’Arabi’] by the criteria of rational philosophy and to

understand his concepts within that framework, ignoring in the

process his own frequent criticism of rational approaches to reality

and forgetting that most non-western religious traditions have very

different perspectives than our own. (24)
Some may argue, on the other hand, that any writer who created in his productive
lifetime 2§1 titlg, as Ibn ’Arabi did (Austin 12), must have valued the power of
organized, written discourse. However, it must be remembered that Ibn ’Arabi
thought of himself first as a mystic and only secondarily as a philosopher (24); he
sought expression of direct spiritual revelation (13), often writing quickly—most of
his works remain uncollected and unpublished even in Arabic (12).

Well, then, if it is not going to be easy to define Sufism as a philosophy in
western terms using western names and categories, what about the word itself?
Etymology is often a useful and revealing tool in western scholarship. Well,
mysteries and confusions about the word abound (are you surprised?), making
even this line of inquiry typically frustrating.

There is a traditional answer to the question about the origin of the word m.

 

36
Selma al-Faqih Hassen asserts that the word is from the Arabic root for "wool,"
alluding to the woolen robes of destitute Sufis worn in the early days of Islam
(Siam 4). Idries Shah, in his introduction to the anthology The Way of the Sufi,
cites and then disparages as pure fabrication this very same tradition (15-16).
Other theories, as Shah summarizes them, include the idea that the word fl is

"linked...to the Greek word divine wisdom (sophia) and also with the Hebrew

 

cabbalistic term Ain Sof (the ’absolutely infinite’)," especially since "Hebrew
experts" almost universally connect early Jewish mystics to the Sufi tradition (14-
15). More interesting still is the theory that the Sufis themselves, having no
etymological history for the word and not worrying for a minute how to define the
term, simply reassert the value of the key letters themselves: S,U,Fnthe so_und of
the letters in that order is significant, according to Shah, for their "effect on
human mentation" (16). It is just mere accident that the same letters are found in
the Arabic word for wool, "sogf."

It does not make things any easier to note, as Shah does, that Sufis "claim that
their knowledge has existed for thousands of years"; yet they "deny that it is
m, affirming that it is an equivalent of the Hermetic, Pythagorean, and
Platonic s " (15). Sufism, apparently we must believe, simply Q what it is. We
cannot ignore, for example, the assertion of Hujwari (in his eleventh century
Marion, the ”earliest available Persian treatment of Sufism") that the word Si
has no etymology (Shah 15).

Nor can we lightly skip over Shah’s satiric statement about Nicholson, himself

the translator of Hujwari’s text:

 

 

37
Nicholson shows no curiosity about this claim [that §u_fi has no
etymology], but thinking about it could have led him to an important
idea on Sufism. For him, quite clearly, a word m have an
etymology. Unconsciously assuming that ’no etymology’ must be
absurd, he looks no further in that direction but, all undismayed,
continues to seek an etymological derivation, like...many others, such
a mind will prefer the word ’wool’ to the seeming paradox of ’no

etymology.’ (15)
Here is a clear example of how and why, if we are really to understand Sufism, its
theories of knowledge and language, we will have to be less bound by our usual
conceptual categories than usual. To put it another way, we won’t be able to
discover a definitive etymology, we won’t be able to settle on a single clear
definition, we won’t be able to make the diversity of Sufism itself into a monolithic
philosophy or religion.

We will have to concentrate instead on the expgg'ence of being a Sufi. As
Austin so rightly demonstrates in his introduction to Ibn ’Arabi, the "greatest
obstacle" to our understanding of Sufism is that "we need to actually gmrience
his [Ibn ’Arabi’s] insights"; this is exactly the dilemma, Austin believes, faced by
any “non-participant" student of mysticism "in whatever tradition" (24). Austin
translates a passage from Ibn ’Arabi’s The Meccan Revelations this way:

Knowledge of mystical states can only be had by actual experience,
nor can reason of man define it, nor arrive at any cognizance of it
by deduction, as is also the case with knowledge of the taste of
honey, the bitterness of patience, the bliss of sexual union, love,
passion, or desire, all of which cannot possibly be known unless one
be properly qualified or experience them directly. (24)
To really be able to define _Su_fi, one would have to become one. And then, of
course, no definition would matter.

In the absence of a pure and simple definition of Sufism, then, we will have to

 

 

38
settle for second-best; that is, we can still try to describe the Sufis themselves.
How would we know a Sufi if we met one? What distinguishes a true Person of
the Way from anyone else?
Martin Lings’ small book What Is Sufism? is the best answer I know of in
English. Lings begins not by trying to define Sufism in purely western terms but by
My; how you would know a Sufi. He invents a parable:

....Let us liken this world to a gardennor more precisely to a nursery
garden, for there is nothing in it which has not been planted there
with a view to its being eventually transplanted elsewhere. The
central part of the garden is allotted to trees of a particularly noble
kind, though relatively small and growing in earthenware pots; but as
we look at them all our attention is caught by one that is arrestingly
finer than any of the others, which it far excels in luxuriance and
vigor of growth. The cause is not naked to the eye, but we know at
once what has happened, without the need for any investigation: the
tree has somehow been able to strike root deep into the earth
through the base of its receptacle. (13)

The Sufi is recognized as one who has struck roots deep into the living soul. We
know this "without the need for any investigation." We recognize that person’s
depth by the vibrant aliveness of branches and fruits; the Sufi stands out in a
crowd. Note that the Sufi still lives among all the other trees, imprisoned as it
were within the garden, but
[t]he full-grown Sufi is thus conscious of being, like other men, a
prisoner in the world of forms, but unlike them he is also conscious
of being free, with a freedom which immeasurably outweighs his
imprisonment. He may therefore be said to have two centres of
consciousness, one human and one Divine, and he may speak now
from one and now from the other, which accounts for certain
apparent contradictions. (14)
Sufis are, then, people who are in this world and very much involved in this world-

-but abo their attention is directed to God. As the Qoran says, regarding all

 

39
Muslim, "We have made you a middle people" (11: 143); as Lings and others
point out, in another way that could mean that Sufis are the ones who could
bridge the east and the west.

The M position, looked at in a certain way, also places the Sufi
consciousness mi; sensation and intellection—neither permitting the Sufi a
mere abandonment of mental purpose on the one hand nor a mere
circumscription of intellectual territory on the other. In fact, Iings’ best short
definition of who a Sufi is, even as distinct from other Muslims, refers in a way to
the life of "middle people": "The choice they [the Sufis] have deliberately and
irrevocably made of the Eternal in preference to the ephemeral is not merely
theoretic or mental but so totally sincere that it has shaken them to the depth of
their being and set them in motion on the path" (30).

Sufis are those who are singularly undistracted on their Way to God. How is a
person qualified to enter a Sufi order and set himself/herself in a community of

people on the Way? Again quoting Lings in his What Is Sufism? "If it be asked

 

what qualification is necessary for entry into a Sufi order, or what it is that impels
anyone to seek initiation, the answer will be that the clouds in the night of the
soul must be thin enough to allow at least some glimmer of Heart-light to
penetrate the gloom" (52). The heart is the seat of revealed knowledge, and it
needs to reflect, as clearly and purely as possible, the "light of the Spirit to the
darkness of the Soul" (51).

Sufism might be thought of as a pathway between the Heart and God, an

opening through the darkness of mere sensation and mentation to (at least an

 

40
imperfect) vision of God. As we shall see, the Sufis, very sensitive to the fallenness
of "Man" nonetheless powerfully focus on the "as if thou" (Lings 58). That is,
whatever can set up a pure vibration of awareness from the Heart to God is what
the Sufi seeks. Sufis are fond of quoting the Qoran on this: The Prophet said,
"There is a polish for everything that taketh away rust; and the polish of the Heart
is the invocation of All " (59). Reciting, speaking, in some cases also the
vibrations of music—certainly prayer—"a thing counts for him [the Sufi] as positive
according to the measure in which it is capable of setting up a vibration towards
the Heart and clearing access to it" (58).

Yet the Sufi cannot live in isolation, alone with God. Not yet. Sufism does not
exclude the outward (The Outward is even one of God’s 99 Names). Rather, the
Sufi seeks oneness, the unity of God, in which the outward is "Conjoined with the
Inward," making the Sufi world a 'Kvorld of symbols" (Tings 93). Sufism excludes
only the W outward and strives to live in harmony with a certain place
between.

It is no accident that the first of Ibn ’Abbad of Rhonda’s Letteg on the Sufi
m criticizes the "jurists," the intellectuals of his day, for their use of reason and
"inflll'ble opinions." One path Ibn ’Abbad defines as "the intellect’s search for
evidence and its inability to understand except by a kind of analogical reasoning
and comparison. This is as far as empirical study will lead one" (62). This is the
world of exoterism, typical of Islamic scholarship through the ages. It leads to a
very limited view of the universe. The other path, the Sufi Path, Ibn ’Abbad

describes as resting ”on the light of certitude, by which only the clear truth is

 

41
manifest [in an esoteric system]. That is the most sublime thing that can descend

from the heavens into the hearts of chosen believers, who comprehend thereby
the Mystic Truth of the Attributes and Names" (62).

Such a lived, experienced condition of Heart-knowledge, existing in the m
and escaping firm rational categories, that is Sufism. It is so hard to define and
talk about precisely because it eludes western categories of thought and
permissible rhetorical facts. It carries us to what we must define next as the place
between.

Between what and what? The sought-after Heart-knowledge is first of all ”to
the left of" sensation, though sense-knowledge and Heart-knowledge are both
typically mg." However, as Martin Lings asserts in his own definitions of
Sufism, "sense knowledge, being the lowest mode of perception, is the most deeply
submerged in space and time and other earthly conditions and is therefore
narrower and more fleeting than "mind-knowledge" (55). At the same time, Heart-
knowledge is ”to the right of" rational knowledge, the categories of purely logical
discourse developed so successfully in the western traditions of rhetoric.

The place between is what the Sufis themselves describe as the inner ”Taste,"
which escapes from these conditions [mere sensation to the left and mere
mentation to the right] "in virtue of its exaltation and is thus of all experiences the
mum and mose enduring" (Lings, 'W 55).

The problem is that we need to redefine for western rhetoric the ways of
discomse for this world between. Otherwise, having no way to "talk about" this

creative and imaginative world, we will not identify it as Real.

42

So many others have noted the extent to which Sufi gnosis consistently refers

back to almost every Sufi’s favorite Qoranic verse, the famous Verse of Light

(XXIV: 35, quoted here from Lings’ Sufi Sam t 9f the Twentieth Cenm):
God is the light of the Heavens and of the earth. His light (on
earth) is like a niche, wherein is a lamp. The lamp is of glass; the
glass is like a shining planet. It is lit from a sacred olive tree that is
neither of the East nor of the West, the oil whereof well nigh
blazeth though the fire have not touched it—Light upon Light! God

leadeth to His Light whom He will, and God citeth symbols for men,
and God is the knower of all things. (43)

Through symbols we may make our path to Light. We may be brought to God-
but neither from the right nor from the left, the East nor the West. Lings’ note to

the Qoranic verse: "Inasmuch as it is neither of th_e Qt nor of mg West, the
sacred olive is the tree of wherem ye turn..., that is, the tree of Gnosis" (43).

mm

He made an inspiration
come upon you
so as to take you out of the prison of your
existence
into the unlimited space of your contemplation.
(Ibn ’Atta’lllah, #54, p. 61)

Shaikh Ahmad al-Alawi, to whom Martin Lings and others refer as the Sufi
Saint of the twentieth century, wrote that "there is only one World, and this is it.
What we look on as a sensible world, the fine world of time and space, is nothing
but a conglomeration of veils which hide the Real world. Those veils are our own

senses:oureyesaretheveilsovertruesightOurearsaretheveilovertrue

43
hearing...[etc]" (Ling 136).

The Real World is this place between.

On the other side, in the world of the jurists, the intellectuals, the logicians, al-
Alawi insists there is no gnosis (140). Similarly, Ibn ’Ata’Illah, in his The Book of
Wisdom, attempted to reveal that God does not have to be argued toward. His
statement #29 beautifully summarizes this insight:

What a difference between one who proceeds 1% God
in his argumentation
and one who proceeds inferentially t_o Him!
He who has Him as his starting-point knows the Real
as It is,
and proves any matter by reference to the Being of its
origin.
But inferential argumentation
comes from the absence of union with Him.
Otherwise, when was it that He became absent
that one has to proceed inferentially to Him?
Or when was it that He became distant
that created thing themselves will unite us to Him? (53)

The basic question is one of dim. Do we start from the world of
duality, from mind and sensation, and then M God, or do we start with
God, the God who is already within us? Sufism, as we know, is that path between,
the path of direct apprehension. Victor Danner’s note to Ibn ’Ata’Illah’s #29
above is a good working summary from which to begin:

Gnosis takes its point of departure from the Real (aL-flggg, which
also means "the truth" and "God” and is one of the 99 Names of
Allah), not with the Creation (al-Khalg , which is, from the usual
point of view, other-than-God; it thus works downward to the world
to God, not upward from the world to God. It is theologians,
philosophers, and others who argue syllogistically from the

‘ imperfection of things to the perfection of God, from multiplicity to
the Divine Unity, and from the relativity of everything to the
Absolute. But their argumentation is defective, for God is not

44

’absent’ at any given moment that one has to ’prove’ Him

inferentially, nor is he so distant that is via created thing or

multiplicity that one must ’reach’ Him. On the contrary, He is

present and Nearuhe is ’here’ and ’now.’ We should start with Him,

not with the World. Ibn Ajibah, in commentary on this Hikmah,

mentions two groups as being, on the other hand, the people of love,

who have gnosis, sanctity, and direct vision, and, on the other hand,

the people of service, who stop at the external shells and have no

light of knowledge and understanding. (135)

Working toward the Middle way, with the people who are Near, would help us
also to steer the middle course, which in turn may help us escape our western love
of dualities. Can we too, in our language, express direct vision? In English? For
direction, we can contemplate one of Kwaja ’Abdallah’s prayers in 11mm
Was:
0 God,
When I look at you, I am proud;
Whenllookatmelamlost;
When I look at myself I melt.
Look upon us that we may discard the baggage of duality, (213)

Just to be briefly reminded about w_hy we should care about discarding "the
baggage of duality," let us remember that the felt mrience of that duality,
especially as it has obsessed us in the western world, is dissociation, alienation, the
despair of disintegration-the sort of spiritual aridity many have said characterizes
the twentieth century, in all the multiplicity of its existential interpretations and
expressions. But to think of a spiritually arid present in contrast to a spiritually
rich past is merely another facet of our dualistic thinking. Haven’t men and
women of the past experienced spiritual aridity? Hasn’t it M been a struggle
to find the Middle Way, really to be the "middle people" which the Qoran

discusses?

45

Of course the experience of spiritual aridity is not new to the twentieth
century. Ibn ’Abbad of Rhonda (1332-1390), for example, felt that he lived in a
spiritual wasteland, especially during his youth in Spain, and that the original spirit
and gnosis of the Sufi Way had been so debased (especially because of the
juridical hair-splitting of the Islamic intellectuals) that he felt called, in being one
of the Near, to show others the closer way to God. He felt that "the good is
ancestral" but that people have to be trained back to it (Renard 10-1 1).

Renard, in assessing Ibn ’Abbad of Rhonda’s relationship to his own time,
also insists in his introduction that, had the Sufi master lived today, he would have
written as Hans von Balthasar wrote (in his 1961 book called Payer):

We live in a period spiritually arid; the images of the world that

spoke of God have become obscure signs and enigmas, the words of

Scripture are marred by skeptics and rationalists; men’s hearts, in

this robot age, are crushed and over-ridden, and they no longer

believe in contemplation. When people turn to prayer, they start

from a feeling of hopelessness and futility; they drag along the

ground and despair of ever rising. The temptation to negation and

despair is so great, it presses so heavily on those who remain

sensitive to the question of the meaning of life that they need to use

all their strength to go against the stream. (20)

When the lived experience of life thirsts for a kind of knowledge, a gnosis,
that can be satisfied neither in sensation (the materialistic world) nor in mentation
(the literate world of the skeptics, critics, and reactionists), the only other choice is
not despair.

Sufism opens up the place between.

The Moses of the Qoran explored this place-and of course in direct access

to God:

46

When Moses asked to see God distinctly, apart from the world, He
answered him: 'Ihou shalt not see Me, ’for I am not outside the
world nor am I in it; I am separate from it, nor joined unto it. gag;

mu the mogtain: if it stand firm in its place, then shalt thou see
Me. ad when the Lord manifested himself unto thg mountam,’ and
the shadow gave place to the substance, and separation attained

unto union, and the mountain and all other places were levelled out

of sight. mm for ’betwcen’ had become
obliterated and ’where’ had vanished, and the eye had been
refreshed with the Eye. (In Lings 166)

Several aspects of this verse have made it dear to Sufis through the ages. For one,
God tells Moses that He cannot be approached through dualistic categories alone-
-he cannot be considered to be either in or out of the world. Similarly, really to be
in the between place is to be in union with God, though the word ’between’ itself
would disappear since it too generates dualistic categories. All of this is where the
”shadow gave place to the substance," where Reality emerged from the merely
real. MW because, as a single living man still attached to the
dualities of this world, wholly to see God, to go to God, would annihilate all the
categories of his experience, the ’where,’ the ’between,’ the ’this,’ or the ’that.’ The
mbetween place for the Sufis to explore and talk about is the path from here to
God; to see God directly would be beyond human endurance, but to see God
ahead-to know that you’re headed in the right direction, to be N ear-«that is the
Sufi Way.

Ibn ’Abbad of Rhonda was among several Sufis, according to Renard, who
conceptualized Sufism as a "third place," a "between way." Renard’s summary of
what Ibn ’Abbad meant by Will!!! could have been written as a commentary

on the very same Qoranic verse regarding Moses:

47
The substance of the Mystic Truth comes into being when a human
being regards himself as nothing, both in himself and his knowledge,
awareness and all his qualities. Now only the laws revealed by the
Prophets and the Messengers are able to conform to such a Reality.
Their revelations contain certain truths that the intellect can arrive
at unaided and others that are beyond the power of reasoning. All
these truths are, nevertheless, professed by the faithful as one simple
entity, and it is their unity that nullifies all [merely human] reasoning
and opinion. For the unity of that which is intelligible and that which
surpasses reason gives rise to a third reality which is neither
intelligible nor beyond reason, and is thus outside either of those
categories; and if is neither of these, then the human being, with his
knowledge and awareness, is reduced to nothing in the face of it. He
thus becomes like a blind person to whom the way is shown and
who lets himself be guided. Now the Mystic Truth is just that. (28)

The "third reality," because it is Mayo, is, in western terms, beyond dualistic
categories. It is the only image that works, it seems, in the literature itself as a
correlative to the state of the Sufi which is reached through guided contemplation.

Now it is the {119393, the power of linguistic choice available in any language,
that may permit individuals to explore this mm. Do we, in fact, retain in
Engl'nh any vestige of a rhetoric that permits exploring the place beyond dualities
which Ibn ’Abbad of Rhonda described in such detail?

It is unlikely, but not hopeless. And the way to find out requires us to
return, as for the Sufis themselves, to the "greater shaikh" the “Son of Plato," Ibn
’Abbad’s great predecessor: m. In this regard we are indeed fortunate to
have Henry Corbin’s pioneering work (translated from the French by Ralph
Mannheim). WW I doubt that any
other western writer could have created a clearer understanding for us of the m
m or the "place between."

Having become one of the modern world’s few really great experts on Ibn

48
’Arabi in particular and medieval Sufi traditions in general, Henry Corbin came to
two key conclusions after years of study and contemplation.

First of all, Corbin concluded that for all "spiritualists," cross-culturally, the
world is "Three-fold”:

Between the universe that can be apprehended by pure intellectual

perception (the Universe of Cherubic Intelligences) and the universe

perceptible to the senses, there is an intermediate world, the world

of Idea-images, of archetypal figures, of subtle substances, of

’immaterial matter.’ (34)

This world is the one I am calling the "place between." Corbin talks about it as the
Active Imagination, a {gal place that Ibn ’Arabi ”penetrated with ease from his
earliest years" (11), the world of symbols or symbolic knowledge.

Please understand m that by Active Imagination, Ibn ’Arabi (as
interpreted by Corbin), does not mean fiction or fantasy. The active imagination
permits a direct apprehension of a sort of reality; those without the capacity and
desire to exercise this capacity—to explore the place between-will not credit it with
actual existence at all. What does this active imagination d_o? It transforms scenery
into symbols:

The active imagination guides, anticipates, molds sense perception;

that is why it transmutes sensory data into symbols. The Burning

Bush [back to the Moses story again] is only a brushwood fire if it is

merely perceived by the sensory organs. In order that Moses may

perceive the Burning Bush and hear the voice calling him ’from the

right side of the valley’-in short, in order that there may be a

theophany, an organ of trans-sensory perception is needed. (Corbin

80)

Now the question becomes, what is the role of language, if any, in the operation

of this creative "pagan of trans-sensory perception"? What could we say about the

49

rhetoric of revelation which such a literacy would entail?

The western rhetorical traditions of logical categories—all the systems of
either/orawill be inoperative here. All the Sufis, it could be said, whether ancient
or modern, agree that m "must not be reduced to theology and philosophy"
(Danner 38).-which means that, to get a full picture, rhetoric must not be thought
of as a branch of philosophy; it is the other way around.

Knowledge of "a place between," a use of what Corbin calls the Active
Imagination—whatever language we may use to describe this creative, potential
capacity—Ibn ’Arabi regarded as the "Triumph" itself, the escape from merely
human dualistic categories. We could call this achievement transcendence, for
what of a better term, as Corbin does. Summarizing Ibn ’Arabi’s life, he writes:

Ibn ’Arabi knew that this triumph [transcendence] is obtained

neither by the effort of rational philosophy, nor by conversion to

what he was later to term a ’God created in dogmas.’ It depends on

a certain decisive encounter, which is entirely personal,

irreplaceable, barely communicable to the most fraternal soul, still

less translatable in terms of any change of external allegiance or

social quality. It is the fruit of a long quest, the work of an entire
lifetime; Ibn ’Arabi’s life was that long Quest....(44)

 

' ble-a lifetime quest. Surely we have
categories of discourse for such an experience in the west; don’t we have western
traditions of mysticism as well?

This leads us to the second of Corbin’s key insights. He focuses squarely on

 

literal and symbolic aspects simultaneously.

The key issue for Corbin is the role of Aristotle’s influence, during the

50
Middle Ages, on the directions in which the east and west would literally or

symbolically develop. In the west, in Spain (the m of Ibn ’Arabi) the
Aristotelian Averroes became the main influence (8). Further east, especially in
Iran (to which MW in order to escape the juridical aspects of
scholasticism), the main influence was the esoteric doctrine of Ibn ’Arabi himself
(9), called by everyone through the ages the MM-

The tension that would define the experimental and intellectual future of
the east and the west was the tension between Plato and Aristotle, Avincenna and
Averroes. The drama of this tension is still being played out nearly a thousand
years later.

It was particularly the neoplatonic angelology of Avincenna, according to
Corbin, which "caused alarm among medieval scholastics" (10). In this angelology
there is a place for an entire M an "intermediate world of Active
Imagination"; this is the place, the home, of "prophetic inspiration and theophanic
visions" (10-11). It is a place of Mag—please understand this as a key point-
thatis,inthetotalityoftheuniverseasitcanbelearnedbyawakeand
contemplative individuals, there are not only two continents, as it were, one of the
(rational) intellect and one not of the intellect. There is a whole universe between
to which our language does not often refer; it too is a place of real intelligence,
clear imagination. This imagination, like the "other" intelligence, is also true, or
neither of them is true, or truth is not a question; but their "fate" is bound
together in any real picture, any comprehensive vision, of human operations.

Another way to establish the reality of the W—wbfle also showing

51

how little the western rhetorical traditions think or write about it—is to focus on
Ibn ’Arabi’s way of defining this place. He centers on what people do in this
place:theyimagine;it'uthehomeofActive Imagination.

Remember again, we are not talking about fantasy or dream. The home of Ibn
’Arabi’s active imagination is just as real as anywhere else.

About the only way we deal with this "world between” in the west is to discuss
W91; generally. But there is precious little writing or research in the
academic west on M95 this is because, of course, our categories of thought
and the languages we use do not teach us how to deal with this subject. As Rollo
MayshowsmhisumquebmkIhLW‘Whenweexaminethe
psychological studies and writing on creativity over the past fifty years, the first
thing that strikes us is the general paucity of material and the inadequacy of the
work"; May thinks this is because the subject has been "avoided as unscientific,
mysterious, disturbing, and too corruptive of the scientific training of graduate
students." What writing there has been—like Adler’s compensatory theory of
creativity to make up for perceived inadequacies—simply does not reflect the
reality of the true We; of creative people (33-35). Could it be that the
relative absence of serious and true talk about creativity in the west has to do with
the inadequacies of our rhetorical categories, the absence once again of the same
"place between”?

Now, again to emphasize the essential aspects of Avincennan angelology,
understand that this world view, this picture or map of the human psyche in

relation to the perceived and knowable universe, retained a separate but equal

52
place between—what Corbin called, of course in referring to Ibn ’Arabi’s ideas, the
"intermediate world of pure imagination." This "intermediate world,” included in
the system, actively created the possibility of an entire "prophetic psychology"
which is by now almost utterly unavailable to the west except by travelling back to
the Sufis and others. It is, after all, this "prophetic psychology," Corbin reminds us,
on which rested the spirit of symbolic exegesis, the spiritual understanding of
Revelations, "in short the m which was equally fundamental to Sufism and to
Shi’ism (etymologically, the ’carrying back’ of a thing to its principle, of a symbol
to what it symbolizes" (12). To deny the intermediate realm of Active Imagination
is to deny people access to their own creative potential, their own language with
God, the ability to directly perceive and hence talk to God.

Corbin defines gm even more clearly, showing how by definition it exceeds
or transcends everyday facts. Interpreting what he has learned from years of work
on the difficult texts of Ibn ’Arabi still in manuscript, Corbin defines the 111211 as
"essential symbolic understanding, the transmutation of everything visible into
symbols, the intuition of the essence or person in an image which partakes neither
of universal logic nor of sense perception, and which is the only means of
signifying what is to be signified" (13). Note: the only means; to deny a person the
use of the Active Imagination of Idea-Images, of "immaterial matter" (4) is to cut
off that person from a path of creative talk with God, the prophetic language of
spiritual d'mcovery.

This is why Corbin, in translating and interpreting Ibn ’Arabi, includes the

word m in "Active Imagination." Only in the Avincennan angelology, the non-

53
dual'ntic map of experience, can there be provided a "radical autonomy of the
individual"-the freedom of a person to participate in the creative energies of God.
The Avirncennan angelology provides a foundation for this radical autonomy,
however, "not in wlmt we should simply call a philosophy of the spirit but in a
theOsophy of the Holy Spirit" (12).

The focus, in other words, of the active imagination which quickens the world
between, is that mm it creates something from nothing, as in
imitation of God’s creation, and it is permitted to do so—as we shall see—partly in
the use of language, especially prayer. To live in the sacred requires that we make
thing real, participate in God. This is exactly what I think a western scholastic like
Mircea Eliade means, in his own way, when he interprets the sacred through his
academic vehicle of comparative religion. For example, note Eliade’s summary to

d o ane: at of eli 'o -The Si

 

Wm always believes that there is an absolute reality,
tht' sacred, which transcends this world but manifests itself in this
world, thereby sanctifying it and making it real. He further believes
that life has a sacred origin and that human existence realizes all of
its potentialities in proportion as it is religious—that is, participates in
reality....By reactualizing sacred history, by imitating the divine
behavior, man puts and keeps himself close to the godsuthat is, in
the real and the significant. (202)

Looked at in these western academic terms, the Sufis mean only to reactualize
history by imitating the divine creative behavior. Only this is real.
Considering all the above, as Corbin along with almost everyone else who has

written about the medieval Sufis points out, it should be no surprise that Sufic

54

theory and practice so alarmed the orthodox. Averroes, for example, in restoring
"authentic Aristoteleanism," severely criticized the neoplatonic Avincenna (Corbin
12). For Corbin, or anyone else sympathetic to the neoplatonic bent of Ibn ’Arabi
and the whole Sufi tradition which he clarified, Averronism ggt off people forever
from the source of their own divine and prophetic intelligence-all in an effort to
neatly and logically deal with the question of the relationship between the
intelligence of people and the Divine Intelligence (once again an insistence on
dualistic categories). Quoting Corbin:

Averroeism denies the human individual as such any possibility of

becoming eternal. In his radical answer to the problem of the

intellects, St. Thomas grants the individual an ’active intellect,’ but

not a separate intellect; the intellect of the individual is no longer of

transcendent or celestial Intelligence. This seemingly technical

solution implies a fundamental decision, the decision to do away

with the transcendent dimension of the individual as such, that is, his

immediate and personal relationship with the Angel of Knowledge

and of Revelation. (19)
If this change was inevitable, Corbin suggests, it was because the medieval
Christian theologian-philosophers so much emphasized the value of the Church as
Institution, the hierarchy of the human church as intermediary between person
and God. All this left precious little space for the creative intelligence between, so
much cherished by Avincenna and other neoplatonists.

The line from Avincenna has become, in the modern age, what westerners
mightbewillingtocall,inthe traditionofmysticismwithin Islam,akindof
"oriental wisdom," a wisdom in which, as summarized by Corbin, "philosophy and
mystical experience are inseparable." Sufism, you remember, is a theory of the

Real, neither only valuing the world of the senses which tie us to this world nor

55

only the world of the rational intellect which ties us to argumentation and bookish
exoterism. In Ibn ’Arabi and others, "a philosophy that does not culminate in a
metaphysics of ecstasy is vain speculation; a mystical experience that is not
grounded in sound philosophical education is in danger of degenerating and going
astray" (Corbin 20). Sufis will feel real feeling, reason clearly in long books, live
everyday lives, pray and sleep; but they will also seek to keep real, in its personal
and powerful mediation, the third world between, the world of active angelic
imagine

By now you see that it is exactly this last which separates the Sufi tradition
both from the merely juridical exoteric tradition of Islam and certainly from
western Christian theology. And the contrast is once again a useful metaphor in
defining, as has been the case throughout this essay, the symbolic nature of
tension between the ”east" and the "west."

Victor Danner, in his introduction to Ibn ’Ata’Illah’s Wm,
confirms this basic contrast as well as Corbin’s essential vision of it. In his analysis
of Sufi gnosis, he asserts again the importance of the m d place, the realm which
requires paradox for its expression if we are working from western categories:
"Gnosis is not possible in Sufism without that mixture of love and knowledge
which characterizes the saintly sage, or the wise saint” (12). If, in the Middle Ages,
the west "abandoned the neoplatonic tradition in favor of Aristoteleanism, ”that
happened during the time of Ibn ’Atta’Illah, St. Thomas Aquinas and other
"scholastic partisans" being his contemporaries-and Meister Eckhard, another

contemporary, being condemned as heretical because of his "sapiential positions"

S6
(16).

In his view of Danner and many others, these are the moments in history
which separated, symbolically and forever, unless we W the
life of the east from the life of the west:

Just as Sufism, which reflects Islamic neoplatonism, laid the

groundwork for the future development of the spiritual life in Islam

of the 13th century, so, similarly, Christian Aristotelianism led

eventually, step by step, to the negotiation of the gnostic message

embedded in the Christian religion and to the rise of rationalism and

the disintegation of the Christian world. (16- 17)

Universally these changes within the west are regarded as a 19g; by the Sufis, even
by Ibn ’Arabi himself. And it is in these terms that most modern commentators in
the west regard the differences between Sufism and all forms of exoterism. It is all
a question of the success or failure of Avincennism and what that loss meant to
generations. In the west, according to Corbin for example, we have "the defeat of
Latin Avincennism, overwhelmed first by the attacks of the pious Guillaume
d’Auvergne, bishop of Paris, then by the rising tide of Averroeism." In the east,
especially in Iran, we have Avincennism gaining new vigor after the time of Ibn
’Arabi, acquiring a new life "that has endured down to our own time" (21).

It is only this eastern, more Avincennan tradition which has preserved the
middle world, the place of the Active Imagination. It is in this world that Sufic
dramaturgy emerged, recitals of irnitiation into Sufi orders (as in the works of
Suhrawardi, in which, according to Corbin, ”the theme is always the Quest of the
encounter with the Angel who is the Holy Spirit and the Active Intelligence, the

Angel of Knowledge and Revelation” (21-22).

57
Corbin emphasizes again and again the symbolic significance, in terms of
east and west, of the triumph of Averroeism in the west (even in Muslim Spain)—
and hence Ibn ’Arabi’s own migration to the orient (9, 29). After all, in his
system, Waning

: an; t' t !. Corbin refers to Averroes’

 

omission as nothing short of a "tragedy," a loss to the entire western world "in the
disappearance of the world of celestial souls, the world of correspondences and
mbstanfiveimageewhosespecificorganofknowledgewastheActive
Imagination" (13).

I too lament the magnitude of this loss. The huge implications of this loss,
as both Corbin and Danner remind us, are apparent when we remember that the
"intermediate world" to which Corbin in his analysis of Ibn ’Arabi constantly
refers, "is the realm where the conflict between theology and philosophy, between
faith and knowledge, between symbol and history, is revealed." The "inherent
ambiguity" of swelling Averroeism geatly intensified such conflicts—and ”this
ambiguity extends to our own time" (33).

Yet it is nourishing to note that the loss referred to here may not be
irremediable. The Sufi tradition, its "truth without form” as developed from the
neoplatonism of Ibn ’Arabi, the Son of Plato (and others), may yet be able to
teach westerners to understand the role of l_a_ngpagg in restorating the place
between. We will need to come to understand Ibn ’Arabi’s notion that: "God
describes Himself to us through ourselves" (Corbin 115); ”creation is an act of the
Divine intention" (193).

 

58
And we will need to be reminded, again and again, of the difference

between searching for meaning, looking for God, reasoning toward God—all of this
on the one hand-and just being united with Him from the start through the
mediation of the "place between." This is the paradox we will seek to overcome:
while rational methods of logic and clear reasoning, worked out in treatises,
actually 39912 us from God (or from expression of our imaginative unity with
God), there '3 a creative role for language in surprising us or tricking us or
mesmerizing us or focusing us into direct knowledge of God-the God within. We
will be propelled along by meditating on the thirty-first saying in ’Ata’lllah’s m
m (53):

Those who are voyaging to Him
are guided by the lights of their orientation,
whereas those who are united to Him
have the lights of face to face confrontation.
The former belong to their lights,
whereas those who are united to Him
have the lights of face to face confrontation.
The former belong to their lights,
whereas the lights belong to the latter,
for they belong to God and nothing apart from Him:
"Say Allah. Then leave them prattling in their talk."
(Qoran 6:42)

e 'te e

What Is Virtue?
Look around you at people who have virtues. You will find that
many people have not been ennobled by their practices, though they
have that repute. The practice of virtues is itself next to nothing. A
thread is not made into a jewel because it passes through the holes
on a series of pearls. I was unable to learn, let alone teach, until I
had realized that a desolate place is not made fertile merely by the
presence of a treasure beneath the ground. (Hamid Qalindoz in

 

59
Shah 253)

Sufis take a dim view of books and the people who make the books out of
mere veneration for facts. Adopting the words and reproducing information are
not virtues, though there may be rewards.

This reminds me of Janet Emig’s notions on "magical thinking," the
unenlightened idea that what is taught is necessarily learned (in Goswami 62). The
Sufis, too, believe in "unmagical" thinking. Emig emphasizes that krnowledge is
something in the process of getting made. Especially she notes that (a) "the
rhythms of writing are uneven" and (b) "the processes of writing can be enhanced
by working in, and with a group of writers, perhaps especially a teacher, who give
vital response, including advice" (in Goswami 64). To quote the Sufis again, "A
donkey stabled in a library does not become literate" (Abdel Ali Haidar in Shah
273). Making knowledge will take time, perhaps even a lifetime, and it cannot be
made and issued into a void. Making knowledge is a group effort led by a
teacher/guide; uses of language will be recursive and developmental twp—not
ends in themselves, but means toward the end of fuller enlightenment.

mg, the knowledge that matters, is a moving target among all Sufi-like
thinkers. Should a person feel that she or he has arrived at ultimate
understanding-and, worse yet, pretend to m it merely in words-that person
is clearly deluded. Victor Danner, in introducing Ibn ’Atta’Illah’s mm
is just one of many who assert that Sufis agree: "Gnosis must not be reduced to
thwlosy 0r PhflmOPhY” (38). 11118!» in his W
simply states that lpgjg (in the western sense of a branch of philosophy) and

60
Mm are mutually exclusive terms. In gnosticism there is certainly no need, iii
the key experience itself, for logical argument at all (139-40).

Yet reverence for the word—as clearly shown by Applebee (1984) and by
England/Tchudi (1978)—-is engrained in our educational culture-and almost always
with the intention of social control. Hence the Great Books syndrome, the
conservative movement for English-only in our schools, the seemingly repetitive
curricula in many schools. Especially in the teaching of literature, Applebee shows
historically the gradual clarification in the minds of many of the dichotomy-the
"progressive goals of improving individuals" versus the "goals of a body politic
concerned with stability" (249). As early as 1918 in an W editorial,
Applebee found the irony: "Training in a little autocracy is a poor preparation for
citizenship in a democracy" (64). And even more important to contemporary
culture, "Preparation for college does not equal preparation for life" (65).

The real life that should matter, for the Sufi within us, is the experience of the
Middle Way, the mystic’s path. We are guided on that path by a teacher, of
course, but also—in both western and eastern social groups-by doctrine. And
Doctrine is, by definition, expressed in m. But for the mystic these must be
living words.

An example will help. Perhaps for the Sufi the simplest doctrine relates to the
one word above all words, the repetition of the Divine Name. Allahuor the
divinely revealed testification: MAM; there is no God but God.

Now the saying of the name or the revealed testification could easily become

mere repetition—no preparation for life there. Or the use of these words

61
contemplatively, creatively, activeb, may help a person to mag at that time a
connection to God. Martin Ling, in his W explains it this way:

W: for the mind it is a formulation of truth; for the
will it is an injunction with regard to the truth; but for the Heart
[the middle place, the himma] and its intuitive prolongations
certainly it is a simple synthesis, a Name of Truth, belonging as such
to the highest category of Divine Names. (63)

 

It is a M along the vibrations of which a person is opened up to the
Truth.

Or there are other Names-99 Names for God. Each echoes in all the others.
One is W. Omnipresence is a name for "Absolute Oneness." And in
this "Absolute Oneness" there is no separate polarity between subject and object,
betweenknowerandkrrown,aodualityagain."l‘obeknownbyGodisthus
mysteriously to be God" (Ling What 15 Sufism? 65). For the Sufi, that is the most
that one would want to learn about life.

There is nothing as useless as dead doctrine, the mere recitation of words, the
use of logical arguments or the writing of treatises for their own sakes. But there
isnothingasusefulasthelivingword. Lings’summaryisbest: "All doctrineis
related to the mind; but mystical doctrine, which corresponds to the love of
Certainty, is a summons of the mind to transcend itself' (What Is Sufism? 63).

The "summons of the mind to transcend itself" is one way to define active
knowledge, Ibn ’Arabi’s "active imagination,” or education generally.

But the central question is, of course, whose krnowledge is to be given to
whom-often with the underlying assumption (by groups in power) that the

Absolute Truth casts externally and that the persons in power shall disseminate

62
that Truth.

It is very Sufic of Jan Cooper when she denies the monolithic purity of a First
Language and argues for the discontinuity of discourse: "Ihe reality of discourse is
characterized by its W which is to say that it is not grounded in any
’original,’ ’true’ language....It is not grounded in some prediscursive reality" (1986,
207). Reality must be rediscovered in language over and over againuwhich is
fictlywhytheSufishaverefinsedtoggtdmasacredtextorevenafinalsetof
guidelines for behavior. Praying and writing, like the writing Cooper talks about in
her "Ecology of Writing," "changes social reality" (7). The key idea for Sufis as for
modern ideas on social discourse is that W it is forever undergoing
revision mg; Again to quote Cooper, "What we mean by social writing is that
writing is located in the social world and, thus, is fundamentally structured by the
shape of that environment" (x). As social environments adapt and change through
time, language and what we theorize language should be doing within groups
changes too.

The key implications for teachers’ relationship with students is this: teachers,
usually from a different generation than students, may be isolated from those they
teach in world view, in their language. Teachers must therefore keep revising their
own linguistic world in order to reach students.

Another Sufi lesson, "Ihe Fool and the Donkey," summarizes this point
(Saadi of Shiraz in Shah 93): "A foolish man was raving at a donkey. It took no
notice. A wiser man who was watching said: ’Idiotl’ The donkey will never learn

an language—better that you should observe silence and instead master the

 

tongue of the donkey.”

This does not of course mean that teachers must merely reverse the tables and
unreservedly accept the world view and linguistic setting of students. But we must
learn to speak their language as a prerequisite for establishing a real community
of learners. We must go to them before we can bring them to us.

Even in Dixon’s early and seminal W Dixon began to
see how social dialects, all single ways of speaking including academic discourse, in
fact m expression. He wrote early in the book of the "paradox of language.”
Language is both public—as especially in the classroom or workplace (or mosque)-
-and private—as "each individual takes what he can from the shared store of
experience and builds it into a world of his own" (6-7). This is the same paradox
referred to before, the paradox Fulwiler emphasized in his Icafl' g With Writrp' g
when quoting Georges Gusdorf (1977): 'The more I communicate, the less I
express myself; the more I express myself, the less I communicate" (in Fulwiler 3).
Prescribing an entire language and curriculum would mean, therefore, an assault
on the person. Hence the low incidence of expressive writing reported by Britton
in his famous study and replicated by Nancy Martin and others (see Martin and
others 2027).

We speak of these distinctions sometimes, with our students, as telling versus
showing, personal writing versus exposition, or inner dialogue versus public
performance. In speaking these ways, our talk is once again typically dualistic.

Also typical, on the contrary, is Ibn ’Arabi’s gipattitt analogy of stages in t1];

gay—that is, the way to understanding and to an expression of that understanding.

64
The first stage is, of course, literal, the merely outward practice of the sham; the
formulaic repetitions. According to Corbirn, Ibn ’Arabi symbolizes this stage by the
stars "whose brilliance darkens as soon as the full moon of the other two stages
rises." The two following stages are those in which the Sufi is "irnitiated" into the
t_a_’_v_vj1, "the symbolic exegesis which ’carries back’ the literal statements to that
which they symbolize"-connecting the inner and the outer, the figurative and the
literal—and of which they are the ’ciphef-taught, in other words, "how to interpret
the rites in their mystic, esoteric sense" (Corbin 49-50). The initiates are brought
beyond mere words mm the words, to self realization thtptrgh tradition.
Whatiscalledfor,then,isnolessthanaredefinitionofcultureuandthgna
redefinition of literacy since, as Friere often insists, "Literacy and education in
general are cultural expressiom. You cannot conduct literacy work outside the
world of culture because education in itself is a dimension of culture" (Friere and
Macedo 51-52).
In this huge efiort of cultural redefinition—ultimately transformation—the Sufis

can help us again. Sheikh Abu Nasr Sarraj spoke of three cultures (in Shah 240):

Worldly culture, which is merely acquiring information, opirnions, and

learning of a conventionalized kind; Religious culture, which is

repetitions, following rules and discipline, behaving in an ethically

acceptable way. Sufi culture, which is self-development, realizing

what is relevant, concentration and contemplation, cultivation and

inner experience.
"Worldly culture" is the realm of Hirschean lists, English-only movements,
standardizedevaluafiom—aflofwhichcodifyandmsifytheprevaflhchmreasa

magahstfieespeechandfiuepemonaldiscoverthisdemonsfiatedina

 

65
famous Sufi parable ("When Death Is Not Death" in Shah 120) in which a man,
thought to be dead, revived. No one believed him when he insisted that he was
alive because (a) he had been certified dead by competent experts and (b) all the
mourners agreed with the experts.

Part of the transformation, the redefinition of culture, will need to be a
profound change among (and especially w__ithip) the powerful intellectuals who
shape or help us to define our culture. The experts have to be made a bit less
sure of their expertise, to begin to participate themselves in the rediscovery of the
W or what we have called the "place between."

The most famous example of such a conversion in Sufi tradition involves no
less a person than Muhammed al-Ghazali (b. 451/1059), who was in his time,
according to all accounts, a leading Sunni scholar/lawyer who had been appointed
professor of divinity at the influential Nizamiya Madrasa (university) in Baghdad
(484/1091). But, so the story goes, al-Ghazali "yearned for a more personal
experience with God," so much so that he entered a ten-year period of retirement.
His famous Sufi text MM is his autobiography in which he
reveals in very honest detail his conversion to Sufism—from exoterism to
exoterism. He became known quickly as m "proof of Islam" (Arberry
79-81). Arberry translates part of this autobiography this way:

Now, the doctrine was easier to me than the practice, so I began by
learning their doctrine from the books and saying of their Shaikhs,
until I acquired as much of their Way as it is possible to acquire by
learning and hearing, and saw plainly that what is most peculiar to
them cannot be learned, but can only be reached by immediate

experience and ecstasy and inward transformation. I became
convinced that I had now acquired all the knowledge of Sufism that

66

could possibly be obtained by means of study; as for the rest there
was no way of coming to it except by leading the mystical life. I
looked upon myself as I was then. Worldly interests encompassed
me on every side. Even my work as a teachernthe best thing I was
engaged in—seemed unimportant and useless in view of the life
hereafter. When I considered the intention of my teaching, I
perceived that instead of doing it for God’s sake alone I had no
motive but the desire for glory and reputation. I realizes that I stood
on the edge of a precipice and would fall into hell-fire unless I set
about to mend my ways...Conscious of my helplessness and having
surrendered my will entirely, I took refuge with God as a man in
sore trouble who has no resource left. God answered my prayer and
made it easy for me to turn my back on reputation and wealth and
wife and children and friends. (80)

The conversion itself, and the autobiographical account of it, have often been
compared to those of St. Augustine. Each had a profound influence on his
religion. Al-Ghazali in particular, because his first fame was as an intellectual and
jurist, helped to make the position of Sufism secure with in the traditions of Islam.
Heprovedtohisowngenerationandoursthatthesamepersoncanpossessboth
"profound learning," remarkable intellectual gifts, and "a theoretical knowledge
and personal experience of Sufi life" (Arberry 82-83).

Still thinking of key difierences between "religious culture" and real "Sufi
culture," one more story will serve-a story which also will act as a perfect prelude
to essential ideas of Pattison and Friere:

Sadik Hamzawi was asked:

"Howdidyou come tosucceed,byhisownwish,
the sage of Samarkand, when you were only a
servant in the house?"

He said: "He taught me what he wanted to teach
me, and I learned it. He said once: ’I cannot teach
theotherathedisciplesfiothesamedegreebecause
they want to ask questions, they demand the meeting,

they impose the framework, they therefore only teach
themselves what they already know.’

67
"I said to him: ’Teach me what you can, and tell

me how to learn.’ This is how I became his successor.

People have cherished notions about how teaching and

learning should take place. They cannot have the

notions and also the learning." (The Naqshbandi Order

in Shah 148)
If students can learn to ask to learn more than they already knowuand if teachers
can overcome their own "cherished notions"-only then can they have the real
learning. Only then can they begin to overcome the predispositions of their
culture.

In the modern world, the relationships among culture, power, and literacy are
perhaps best understood by examining the theories of Pattison and Friere.
Pattison’s vision of early Christiarnity is especially relevant here since it was at that
point in history that Sufi and early Christian (western) ideas on culture and
literacy diverged. (Note that we have already emphasized the dichotomy between
Averroes and Avincenna).

Literacy became a battleground then and now, Pattison believes, precisely
because people can use literacy to further their own interests (83). This is why
Pattison, in his 1982 W sees the early church as a scene of tension
between Book and Word, the Christians in revolt against established order. Then
the irony: when the church itself assumed authprity, literacy was restricted in order
to maintain authority. literacy was for the elite in one of the earliest "Great
Books" ascendencies. Whoever controls how literacy is defined and who has access

to it necessarily restricts access for others (Pattison 72-86). In the modern world

that split led—perhaps through the powerful agency of Matthew Arnold—to the

68

apparent isolation of education from popular culture, the alienation contemporary
students of all ages are likely to feel from the language and modes of thinking of
our schools. As Applebee paints the picture, Americans embraced the view in
W (1867) that education should become an agent for "social
control"-"to stem the ’erosion’ of cultural values" (23).

To bridge this gap in the twenty-first century is not going to be easy. As Henry
A. Giroux shows in his introduction to Friere and Macedo’s Literagy; Reading the
W we will fall far short merely to revise the curriculum to
include reading from minorities or third world writers. We and our students must
instead work together to revise culture itself. Only to get to know our students
and to give them culturally particularized reading matter is no basic revision of the
power structure at all: "It [such a plan] fails to understand that literacy is not just
related to the poor or the inability of subordinate groups to read and write
adequately; it is also fundamentally related to forms of political and ideological
ignorance that functions as a refusal to know the limits and political consequences
of one’s view of the world" (in Friere and Macedo 5).

Our view of literacy must mean cultural litgrag—"critical literacy has to
explicate the validity of different types of music, poetry, language, and world view"
(Friere and Macedo 53). An "emancipatory literacy" (54) allowing for a
multiplicity of discourses, while requiring political and social transformation first
(55), can permit a critical reinvention of culture. Differences among people and
the bases of power which distinguish them can become a discussion in which

subjectivity is not suppressed but facilitated. Since all language is packed with

69

ideology (Friere 128), we can make that ideology the very subject of our dialogic
discourse. We must read and write the world first (50) before we can hope to
really talk about it. F riere himself offers the best summary:

Schools do not really create subjectivity. Subjectivity functions within

schools. Schools can and do repress the development of subjectivity,

as in the case of creativity, for example. A critical pedagogy must

not repress students’ creativity....Creativity needs to be stimulated,

not only at the levels of students’ individuality, but also at the level

of their individuality in a social context. Instead of suffocating this

curious impulse, educators should stimulate risk-taking, without

which there is no creativity. Instead of reinforcing the purely

mechanical repetitions of phrases and lists, educators should

stimulate students to doubt. (57)
Friere’s view of literacy echoes, though in his own language, the wisdom of the
Islamic mystics. As Idries Shah demonstrates in his 111; Way of the Spfi, "All Sufi
teaching are held basically to belong to their own time. The Sufi message in
written form is regarded as being of limited effectiveness" (259).

To summarize, knowledge is neither something given nor something received.
It is always made. And whern, in just that form, it no longer communicates or it
becomes obsolete, it is M. English education, like Sufism, is in the process of
reinventing culture.

Yet the danger of misjudging the Truth in others, or of enforcing conformism
in the name of freedom, remains high within the institutions in which we operate.
It is possible that our institutional conformism now could be just as intolerant as in
the days of the early (medieval) "intoxicated" Sufis. Martin Ling reminds us how
Hallaj was put to death fer saying "I am the Truth"; Ling sees this as an example

of how "spiritual drunkenness" can be "misunderstood by the exoteric community"

70
W 104). Similarly, Arberry celebrates Abu Yazid of Bistam, the
very first of the so-called "intoxicated Sufis," who "scandalized the orthodox" by
exclaiming, "Glory to me! How great is my majesty!" (54). And even in our own
time, Meher Baba (in his The Evgtythth' g Qd Nothing published in Sydney in
1963) is quoted as having written: "There is only one question. And once you
know the answer to that question there are no more to ask....0ut of the depths of
unbroken Infinity arose the question, Who am I? And to that there is only one
answer-J am God!" (In Spfitm 18).

Having "stimulated students to doubt" (F riere, above), educators must be
willing to accept and respect the creative uniqueness in each individual student-
even if that student’s expressions seem "intoxicated" or extreme in some way. In
the thought of Attar (the Persian Mystic), the soul must be led back to its native
home [in God] (Smith 23); but then those "in the neighborhood" need to be
willing to let that soul occupy its home.

It is, in fact, Attar, in his famous W ("Discourse of the Birds")
who tells quite perfectly of the Sufi path to knowledge-the stripping of the veg
(Smith 20) on the way to God. This "allegory of the Sufi’s slow and arduous
journey to God" (28) bring the searcher through seven valleys—the valleys of
search, love, knowledge, detachment, unification, bewilderment, and annilnilation
(29). In the Valley of Love, love is stronger than reason: "The reason is naught
but smoke" (46), for love cannot be understood by the mind alone.

Reaching as far as the Valley of Gnosis, each of the travelling "birds" must

find his or her own way. No one can experience or define the way for anyone else;

71
each makes progress according to only his or her capacity: 'Though the geat were
to fly with all its might, could it ever equal the perfection of the wind? Since, then,
there are difi'erent ways of making the journey, no two birds will fly alike" (50).
Having now been m some understanding of the Valley of Gnosis, the person
who enters there will never wish to leave, accepting instead the beauty of this
revelation (even though there are more valleys to travel ahead) as approaching
perfection. Again quoting Attar in the Smith translation, "When the sun shines
upon him, the dust-bin of this world is changed for him into a rose garden: the
kernel is seen beneath the rind...A hundred thousand mysteries are revealed to
him from under the Veil" (50).

Having been blessed in such a way, why shouldn’t the traveller be content to
stay in the valley forever? Why the longing for a yet more complete union with
God? Why is there speech at all, poetry, the telling of the journey—all when it is
really only the journey that counts? The birds in Attar’s geat allegory learn the
answers from the parable of the Phoenix:

The Phoenix is a wonderful bird, which is found in Hindustan. It
has no mate but dwells alone in solitude. Its beak is wonderfully
hard and long, like a flute, containing holes to the number of nearly
a hundred. Each of these holes gives forth a different tone, and each
tone reveals a different mystery. The art of music was taught to this
bird by a philosopher who became its friend, and when the Phoenix
utters these sounds, bird and fish are agitated thereby: all the wild
beasts are reduced to silence, and by that entrancing music are
bereft of their senses.

The Phoenix lives about a thousand years; it knows quite clearly
thetime ofits deatln, andwhenth'nknowledgeistearingatitsheart,
it gathers fuel, a hundred trees or more, and heaps them up in one
place. It hastens to place itself hr the midst of this pyre, and utters a
hundred laments over itself. Then through each of those holes in its

72

beak, out of the depth of its spotless soul, it gives forth plaintive
cries of woe, and as it utters its dying lament, it trembles like a leaf.
At the sound of its music, all the birds of the air gather together,
and the wild beasts come, attracted by the sound, and all assemble
to be present at the death of the Phoenix, knowing that they must
die like it. When the moment has come to draw its last breath, the
Phoenix spreads out its tail and its feathers, and thereby fire is
kindled, and the flames spread swiftly to the heaped-up wood, and it
blazes up with vigour. Soon both pyre and bird become a glowing
red-hot mass. When the glowing charcoal is reduced to ashes, and
but one spark remains, then, from the ashes, a new Phoenix arises

into life. (5 1-52)

Not having yet reached absolute oneness with God, the love and the longing are
so intense-the apprehension of glory so near-«that the birds are inspired to song,
in the flutes of which each hole "gives forth a different tone, and each tone reveals
a different mystery."

It is only in the very last valleys, on the journey to God, especially in the
"Valley of Poverty and Annihilation," that the seeker enters a state beyond the
power of the mind to gasp or word to express. "When the Ocean of Infinity

begins to stir its waves, how can the reflections upon its surface remain where they

are? The world present and the world to come are as pictures reflected on its

waters..." (55).

 

Sufi attitudes and practices, both ancient and modern, regarding the writing
and publishing of books should be no surprise to anyone with an awareness of

mystical traditions generally. These attitudes and practices bring those interested

73

in what the ancient Sufis have to reveal to modern researchers face to face with
the exact irony which is usual among mystics: while the Sufis express a geat
distrust of books and a great sensitivity to the limitations of public discourse, they
have produced, nonetheless, a rich literature over the ages. Many Sufis have
themselves been prolific writers.

At the forefront in Sufis’ suspicion of printed knowledge is that much greater
faith in direct communication of awareness from teacher to initiate, from the one
nearesttoGodtotheonejustnexttohim.Martinling,indiscussingtheroleof
modern prophecy in W quotes an old Sufi
maxim: 'Take knowledge from the breasts of men, not from their words." ling
also expresses the usual conclusion among commentators on Sufism regarding the
W as Muslims get more and more separated in time
from Muhammed and his Divine Revelation. ling quotes a famous woman of the
tenth century, a Sufi of Bukhara named Kalabadhi (in a translation from Arberry’s
WM: "Then [after the second generation of Islam] desire
diminished and purpose flagged: and with this came the spate of questions and
answers, books and treatises" (43). Books became necessary, in other words, only
when a more living relationship to knowledge faded. We have books for when we
need to accept second best.

Yet a person must not get the impression that books should be taken too
seriously. Why should Sufis write so many books? ling quotes Sheikh as-Alawi
(the "twentieth century saint") on this subject too. Al-Alawi insists that when

certain thoughts phrgue and preoccupy a person, that person should know what to

74
do: 'Take them out of your brain and put them in a book, and then they will let

you rest" [even if you don’t publish the book] (58-9). In other words, than are for

sothatwecan

 

focus on what really counts.

What always most counts is the knowledge learned directly from a teacher;
again, books are only second best. While, by the fourteenth century, lbn ’Abbad of
Rhonda could assert that books could then be "guides," he also took geat pains to
show that it is up to God to send appropriate guides at appropriate times. These
guides are usually and preferably people, but books are possible substitutions.

Yet Ibn ’Abbad, also typically, cautioned those around him to see that very
few books are great enough to serve the role of spiritual guides in the absence of
a teacher. In the twelfth of his W he recommended a
certain book to his reader (Ibn ’Ata’s Wt) with the added
admonition that, if an active participation in "God’s unity" is the goal, once you
[the reader of W really gasp the book, "you will have no need of
other renowned writing" (175). No Sufi recommends reading just whatever is at
hand; reading for pleasure is a modern idea. Ibn ’Abbad concludes: "Take hold of
what is before your eyes and leave aside that which you have only heard of: when
the sun has risen, what need will you have of Saturn?" (175).

Likewise, when looked at from the perspective of life and death and what
endures of us after our passing, what good are books? What good is the name
"Islam" and all the arguments in treatises about its meaning and its categories?
HasanofBasraisquotedbyShah:"Whenheasked, ’Whatislslam, andwhoare

75
the Muslims?’ he answered: ’Islam is in the books, and Muslims are in the tomb’"
(162).

I remind you again: "The aim of a book may be to instruct, yet you can also
use it as a pillow...." (Jalaludin Rumi in Shah 110).

Sufi books gain importance, in the realm of Sufi endeavor, then, primarily as
guides. They must be kept in perspective as means to an end, never as ends in
themselves. They help guide us to knowledge, but they are not in themselves that
knowledge. In the following Sufi parable, they are "a vehicle":

Travel-With and Without a Vehicle
If you cast yourself into the sea, without any guidance, this is full of
danger, because man mistakes thing which arise within himself for
thing arising from elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you travel on
the sea in a ship, this is perilous because there is danger of
attachment to the vehicle. In the one case, the end is not known,
and there is no guidance. In the other case, the means becomes an
end, and there is no arriving. (Niffari in Shah 187)
At minimum, a person would have to be guided in reading the books to gasp
their importance. Otherwise, one can either be lost at sea or stuck on the ship.

And all agee that only a few books are worth reading. Titus Burkhardt, in his
preface to Austin’s translation of WW writes that the Sufis tell
us "the only books worth our attention are those which spring from the heart [not
the mind] and in turn speak to the heart" (xi). But what the Sufis mean by the
heart is far different from our western concept of emotion or feeling: the heart is
the organ of the place between, the "active imagination." Burkhardt puts it his own
way: the heart is "the meeting place of the soul or mind or, more precisely, is the

focal point where the mind, which is in itself all knowledge or light, is reflected in

76
the mirror of the Soul" (xi).

Ibn ’Arabi’s own publication history and approach to writing might help to
clarify these points. He wrote 251 titles, according to his translator R.W.J. Austin,
linking east and west, unifying many traditions, drawing from whatever aspects of
spiritual tradition he could find (12-14). In the W his best known
work and one of the few translated and analyzed thoroughly in western languages,
the title itself gives away method and purpose. M means "setting in which the
gem, engaved with a name, will be set to make a seal ring." Al-’Arabi means that
"each prophet, after whom each chapter is entitled, is the human setting in which
the gemstone of each kind of wisdom is set, thus making of each prophet the
signet or sign, by selection, of a particular aspect of God’s wisdom" (16).
Contemplating the unity in this diversity, the unique beauty of each of the
prophet’s revelations, and seeking to synthesize them in the vision—these are
laudable goals for a book. As Burkhardt says in his Preface, "Water derives its
color from the vessel that holds it" (xii).

Yet W like all of Ibn ’Arabi’s books, is not logically
arranged. It is digessive and unbalanced, treating some prophets summarily and
others in geat detail. Even modern commentators are sometimes hard-pressed to
grasp connections between the quoted Qoranic passages and the lessons Ibn
’Arabi seems to wish to draw from these passages. And why do all this work for
others anyway? Ibn ’Arabi himself claimed to write from direct inspiration, directly
from spiritual revelation (Austin 12- 13).

Speaking of spiritual revelation, what about the Qorarn itself, really the mg

77
mph? In Ansari’s MW he asks: "O Godl/ Your glorious book is
a keepsake from you./ Since you are present therein,/ What need is there of a
momento?" (94). Why should any other sign or book be required?

The answer may be that the Book does not quite reveal Itself only because it
is read a few times through. It reveals AND Elk- In interpreting Ibn ’Arabi’s ideas
on text, Austin summarizes the issue this way: "Each verse [of the Qoran] has
many more meaning than the one that might be obvious to the ordinary believer,
who sees merely the surface of thing" (18). Irnspired words need interpretation, it
is true-but not in treatises: personal guides are required.

It is no wonder that most commentators, in clarifying Sufi attitudes to the
Goran, are reduced to quotation from the Qoran itself. The Qoran does, in fact,
have a geat deal to say about its own verses. For example:

It [the reading of the verses] causes the skins of those that fear their
Lord to thrill. Then their skins and their hearts gow pliant unto the
remembrance of God. (39:23 in ling, W 60)

This is similar to the usual Sufi distinction between the intellect and the soul,
conviction and Certainty. The Qoran offers the hope of Certainty that comes from

between. Likewise, the Sufis often recite 45:3-5, as quoted, for example, in the

introduction to Ibn ’Abbad’s W:

Behold, in the heavens and the earth are signs for those who
believe. And in your creation, and all the wild creatures He has
scattered over the earth as signs for the people of firm faith. And
the alteration of night and day, and the sustenance that God sends
down from the sky, quickening thereby the earth after her death,
and the ordering of winds-these are signs for a people who
understand. (8)

"Signs for a people who understand": such understanding can be found in very few

 

78

books.

Perhaps it is best to conclude that the Sufis’ ambivalence about books is never
resolved. Great books have been created by geat Sufi masters, but in most
situations and for most people, these very same books are, in themselves, of little
worth. Titus Burkhardt, again in his "Preface" to Ibn ’Arabi’s Mm
re-tells the culminating story (in this case about Mohamed ben Makhluf):

"What are you going to do with that?" he asked me [a Master
referring to an initiate with a book]. "It is much too advanced for
you. What you need is a primer" [for the spiritual life]. "In that case,
the book shall remain on my shelf until I am wise enough to study
it." "When you are wise, you will no longer need the book." "Whom

was it written for then?" "For men who can see through walls but do
not do so, nor even wish to."

Words and Text
The Sufis have always had a rather modern approach to ideas about Mpg,
the making of meaning out of printed text. For them, perhaps surprisingly, there is
no one meaning to interpret, even in a qoranic text. There are only levels of
understanding the self, the text reflecting back to readers only what they are
prepared—by instinct, training, or experience—to understand.
A stary of Ibn ’Arabi’s ideas in them is a good example
of the Sufi concept of text as mirror:
Beneath the surface...lies an ocean of meaning, both subtle and
spiritual, that is accessible only to tlnose whose inner eye is open,
whether by divine gace or proper training. In this way...the text acts,
so to speak, as a mirror to the reader, in that the latter will perceive

in it only that which his own spiritual state permits him to see."
(Austin 19)

79

"Those whose inner eye is open" only will see beneath the surface of an "ocean of
meaning." This will take training, the preparation of spiritual states available on
the Sufi way.

It is not surprising, then, that modern commentators have detected, in _T_h£
W the cabbalistic tradition of the Jews, the gnostic tradition of
Christianity, and the infiltration of Buddhist and Hindu ideas (Austin 23). One
sees what one is prepared, by disposition or training, to see.

Such an expectation for a text, please remember, is partly engendered by the
way in which a text gets written, under what circumstances. For example, Henry

Corbin refers to Ibn ’Arabi’s It ' '

 
 

least 3,000 pages, the "Bible of esoterism in Islam" (73), but also unavailable in

English. Then Corbin quotes Ibn ’Arabi this way: "An author who writes under the
dictates of divine inspiration often registers thing that are without [apparent]
relation to the substance of the chapter he is engaged in writing" (74). Such
writing, resisting "the conceptual development of a dialectic carried on according
to the laws of Aristotelian logic" (Corbin 74), will require each reader to create
connections of his or her own. People will be expected to reconstruct the text
differently—in the Sufi view, according to their position on the way, their time and
their place, and their receptivity to the message.

Words and texts are not therefore gifts from which to create dogna.
Characteristically, each person must create his or her own experience as a "middle

person," not desiring at the outset to conform to any expectation from the outside.

80
Corbin interprets the words of Ibn ’Arabi this way: the form in which each of us
receives the Master’s thought conforms to an "inner heaven": this, according to
Corbin, is the "very principle. of the theophanism of Ibn ’Arabi,"
who for that reason can only guide gflh man individually to what he
alone is capable of $31289 and not bring him to any collective pre-
established dogna: Talem cum vidi gualem camre mtui. The truth
of the individual’s vision is proportional to his fidelity to himself, his
fidelity to the one man who is able to bear witness to his individual
vision and do homage to the guide who leads him to it. (75-76)
Two people reading the same words are likely to have difi'erent experiences of the
text. Each is true.

If the Sufi thought of Ibn ’Arabi and others like him has been rejected over
the ages, Corbin believes that is no surprise; people have preferred to sidestep
"the self-knowledge and self-judgement that this spirituality entails" (76). They
have preferred to speak in terms of nominalism or realism or other categorical
terms, avoiding the "decisive contemplation" to which a Sufi text points (Corbin
76).

The best Sufi texts would therefore be ones of hints and allusions, full not of
down but of s_igr_r_s. Whereas the treatises created by a "scholastic theology"..."will
only serve to increase your doubts and pile up illusion upon illusion" (ling 54),
texts made up of words used in a different way can not only conceal but also
mg]. As ling points out, a person can accept words "as a manner of speaking,
allowing them to pass over his head," pr: these words might open again that
middlewaywhichisadirectWaytoGod. Wordsgpawaken "avertical

consciousness," which ling says is what Sufis mean by gthapg, "literally ’taste’";

81

"this word is used in view of the directness of perception, to show that it
transcends indirect mental knowledge, being no less than some degee of ’heart
knowledge” (39).

If texts do not help open up this vertical consciousness or help train people to
open up this vertical consciousness, they are probably not worth reading (for you,

right now). The trick is to read just a few books extremely well.

Even in the case of modern prophecy, according to Martin ling in mm
Waphofisms amusedtostat‘llsthcmindinto

 

ThisisthemnjpgofwordsinSufifiadifiombestfound,ofcourse,inthe
Qoranitself. Ifthe object of the Revealed Book Itselfis to bring the SufitoGod,

howdomemrdsofthetextdothat?Ung,misfimemhis_Wthj§_$_hfim2,best

expresses the answers by quoting Frithjof Schuon’s W (p. 50); I
can only do the same:

"The Quran is, like the world, at the same time one and multiple.
The world is a multiplicity which disperses and divides; the Quran is
a multiplicity which draws together and leads to unity. The
multiplicity of the holy Book—the diversity of its words, sentences,
pictures, and stories-fills the soul and then absorbs it and
imperceptibly transposes it into the climate of serenity and
immutability by a sort of divine ’cunning.’ The soul, which is
accustomed to a flux of phenomena, yields to the flux without
resistance; it lives in phenomena and is by them divided and
dispersed—even more than that, it actually becomes what it thinks
and does. The revealed Discourse has the virtue that it accepts this
tendency while at the same time reversing the movement thanks to
the celestial nature of the content and the language, so that the
fishes of the soul swim without distrust and with their habitual
rhythm into the divine net." (In ling 79-80)

Recitation

It is said that Ibn ’Abbad of Rhonda knew the Qorarr by heart by the age of
seven. Nor is such an early accomplishment rare even today. According to the
video progam "Islam" from Eyre’s BBC series The Lang Search (#5 in the
sequence), many youngters learn the entire Goran—about the size of the New
Testament—by heart even in our time, certainly in the villages of Egypt.

The repetition, the personal krnowledge, the recitatiop itpeh, are experiences
which many Muslims and most Sufis over the ages have treasured. Memorizing
and reciting verses can open up the soul to God—and again, I remind you, through
the agency of the active imagination we have spoken of as the "place between."
According to Martin Ling in his introduction to al-Alawi, whole versesuthe
m of whole verses-are limited only by the intelligence and imagination of
those who recite them; "they can be, if interpreted in their highest sense, as
opening through which the immortal in man may pour itself out in escape from
the mortal limitations of the soul" (36). The words themselves do not achieve
these aims, of course, but Sufis can ride the wot-g into a higher plane of
existence.

The recitation of the Qoran is in this sense its own language, having nothing to
do with mere Arabic. In R.W.J. Austin’s introduction to his translation of Ibn
’Arabi’s The m of Andalusia Austin summarizes the role of the Qoran itself
and Qoranic recitation in a simple way: the words of the Qorarn are a M; for
"men whom neither trading nor selling diverts from the remembrance of God"

(quoting the Qoran), the all "summons the Sufi away from ego over the long

83
distance and deep gulf to God" (52). And Austin, like almost every other western

writer on Sufism, strategically quotes from the Qoran itself (VI: 92): "Say God and
leave them floundering in confusion" (52).

"Saying God" is itself a language. It is not Arabic. It is not gammar. It is the
language of the Sufi Way in action, the way between, for those who are Near.

The mg] quality of recitation together with its gghphchy (a person needs
no special paraphernalia or ritualistic knowledge) make it a sort of escape from
the mind. Whereas, in a sense, westerners may want to use words logically and
precisely in order to argue theological issues or even to pray persuasively, the
Qoranic words of recitation are meant to put the mind to rest. As Martin ling so
potently asserts (in W7), "For the mind alone and unaided it is
impossible to resolve into Oneness the duality of Creator and Creation" (66).
Sufis, like everyone else, need he_lp to transcend duality. Yet, just as in the Frithjof
Schuon passage quoted above, the Qoranic words and their prayerful recitation
can prepare "the fishes of the soul [to] swim without distrust and with their
habitual rhythm into the divine net."

Quoting Shaikh ’Ali al-Jamal, "Relax the mind and learn to swim" (in M
SM? 67). Mental perplexity may be a necessary part of anyone’s personal
development—even an essential aspect of mental and spiritual gowth. Sufis would
agee with this; but for them the issue is how the mind should respond to
perpluty-not, as likely in the west, by analyzing, classifying, arranging, and
synthesizing—pp: rather (as ling would summarize it), "Let go of your mind so

that your soul, now out of its depth, may experience the spontaneous stirring of

84

intuition, just as a body out of its depth in water may experience the spontaneous
stirring of its limbs in the movement of swimming" (67). (Here ling, in a
footnote of his own, connects these aspects of spontaneous mental-intuitive action
with the use of the m in the Zen tradition to meet mental perplexity with
creative and personal action. I will develop this connection in the next chapter).

For many Muslim, then, and most Sufis too, recitation of the Qoran is thg
means of concentrating on God, of setting ofi from shore. "The Sufis speak of
’seeking to be drowned’ (istighraq) in the verses of the Qoran" (Ling M
W 25). They express in this way their will to transcend selflrood and duality
in the "rmcreated word of God" (25).

ltisalsolinsflthoushthistimeinflwmwho
reminds us that the first word of the Qoran itself, the first word of the Revelation
of Muhammed, was "the imperative igta_’, ’recite’; and qur’an itself means
’recitation’" (35). What Muslims everywhere are to do is recite the verses of the
Qoran.

There is no analagous tradition that I am aware of in the west, no believing so
utterly in revealed words as the vehicle of participating in the creative work of
GodThisisbecause"therevealhgofatenwberedtednecessarflyamounts,at
the summit of the community which receives it, to the inauguration of a form of
mysticism" (ling 35). I think this means, in other words, that recitation (unlike,
say, the reading of verses in the Christian traditions just before sermons or
homilies) helps

Muslims to participate m in the Divine Revelation which it was

Muhammed’s work only to receive.

While, for us, sermons and homilies may help to m the verses, Sufic
recitation explains itself. The recitation of revealed text participates in the
inauguration of a form of mysticism which I think only ling has adequately
explained in western words:

....to recite such a text is to undergo a divine "interference," a

mysterious penetration of the soul by the Spirit, of this world by the

next, and the practice of taking advantage of this possibility

becomes, after a certain point, no less than following a mystic path.

(35)
It is this mystic path which is open to the Muslim who recites the verses of the
Qoran the way the Sufis have learned to do so, in expectation of personal
extinction within the geater reality of the Revelation itself. In this regard Ling
once again remembers to refer to the Sufi tradition of "drowning": "The Sufis have
always sought to take full advantage of the Presence of the Infinite in the finite by
’drowning’ themselves in the verses (ayat, literally ’mysterious signs’) of the
Revelation" (35).

To quote Shaikh Ahmad al-’Alawi, the "twentieth century saint," when

speaking of the Qoran: "It hath taken up its dwelling in our hearts and on our

tongues and is mingled with our blood and our flesh and our bones and all that is

inns"(l2i1V.an64inling35).

Prayer in Sufi Thought and Practice: "Ardent Talk"

Do not abandon the Invocation
because you do not feel the presence of God therein.
For your forgetfulness pf the Invocation of Him

86

is worse than your forgetfulness in the Invocation of Him.
Perhaps He will take you from an Invocation with
forgetfulness
to one with vigilance, and from one with vigilance
to one with the Presence of God,
and from one with the Presence of God
to one wherein everything but the Invoked is absent.
"And that is not diffith with God."

(Ibn ’Ata'mah. W #47)

"And that is not difficult with God" (Qoran 14:20)-what is not difficult for
God is to lift the Sufi from his or her prayerfulness into a place "wherein
everything but the Invoked is absent." Yet this cannot and will not happen if the
Sufi neglects to pray: "Your forgetfulness pf the Invocation of Him/ is worse than
your forgetfulness hr the Invocation of Him." If praying but not mindfully (or, in
Sufi terms heartfully), that is at least the beginning of prayerfulness. How could
one upset to experience His presence in prayer without praying?

In this regard AJ. Arberry beautifully quotes an "authentic description of
intimacywithGod"(byIsaal-Kharraz,d.286/899): 'Thenhissoulisjoyfully
busied with secret converse with God, and passionate study, and ardent talk" (56).

It is in this "ardent talk," often more private than public recitation, in which
Sufis reveal themselves the most. Or they conceal themselves. It is like the old
problem of the empty space and the silence around words when the question
becomes whether the words or the silence engender the most meaning.

Prayer is for sure "secret talk"-the kind of "permanent prayer of the heart"
(Ibn ’Atta’lllah #55) which solves the problem presented in the passage from Ihg
mm above. For at some point abandoning invocation, stopping
prayer, is no more possible than to will a cessation of breathing. Thinkim about its

87
studying the "gammar of prayer," is as useless as trying to define one’s own
breathing.

This reminds me of the "celebrated Ibrahim b. Adham, Prince of Balkh (d.
160/777), the legend of whose conversion to austerity became a favorite there
among Sufis" (Arberry 36); when a disciple asked him to define service, he
replied, "The beginning of service is meditation and silence, save for the
recollection (dhikr) of God." Even more to the point, when this same Sufi was
informed "that a certain man was studying gammar, he commented, ’He is in
geater need of studying silence’" (in Arberry 37).

However, once again it is in the writing of Ibn ’Arabi, for the most part
hidden from western readers because of the absence of translations and
commentaries in western languages, that the uniqueness of Sufi understanding of
prayer reveals itself. I do not think one could derive the same understanding of
prayer, and especially the role of language and imagination in prayer, anywhere
else-not in Christian mysticism, not in all the manifestations of nineteenth century
idealism, not (very likely) in the recesses of one’s own heart.

The Sufis, and especially Ibn ’Arabi, clarify for westerners the real meaning of
the gnostic tradition in the very way they define and use prayer. Let me
summarize and interpret Henry Corbin’s commentary on Ibn ’Arabi in order to
establish this point.

Let’s begin this way: most westemers—especially in modern times, let us
assume-regard prayer as a kind of supplication. The idea, the jggjt, of prayer,

especially in the Christian tradition, is to intercede, to intervene, to interfere with

88
God in such a way that God’s attitudes or actions with respect to us might be

changed: make my friend well, give me composure or knowledge, and so on.
God’s is the geater reality; his is the only really Active Imagination.

As we shall see, Ibn ’Arabi’s ideas about prayer (as Corbin reveals them) are
quite opposite, attributing as they do to the W and to those who make
it, an active role in affecting or even re-creating the world-and not the unreal
world, nouthe actual world outside of us. To quote Corbin at length:

For prayer is not a request for something: it is the expression of a
mode of being, a means of existing and of aging to exist that is, a
means of causing the God who reveals Himself to appear, of
"seeing" Him, not to be sure in His essence, but in a m which
precisely He reveals by revealing Himself by and to that form. This
view of prayer takes the gound from under the feet of those who,
utterly igrorant of the nature of the Theophanic Imagination as
Creation, argue that a God who is the "creation" of our Imagination
canoniybe"rmreal"andthattherecanbenopurposeinprayingto
such a God. For it is precisely because he 1; a creation of the
imagination that we pray to Him, and that He exists. Prayer is the
highest form, the supreme act of the Creative Imagination. By virtue
of the m of roles, the divine Compassion, as theophany and
existentiation of the universe of being, is the Prayer of God aspiring
to issue forth from His unkrnownness and to be known, whereas the
W accomplishes this theophany because in it and
through it the "Form of God" (surat al-Haqq) becomes visible to the
heart, to the Active Imagination which projects before it, in its
m, the image, whose receptacle, (epiphanic form, mazhar) is the
worshipper’s being in the measure of its capacity. God prays for us,
which means that He epiphanizes Himself insofar as He is the God
whom and for whom we pray (that is, the God who epiphanizes
Himself for us and by us). We do not pray to the Divine Essence in
its hiddenness; each faithful (’abd) prays to his Lord (Rabb), the
Lord who is in the form of his faith. (248)

We will see in what ways Corbin builds to this particular summary-exposition of
Ibn ’Arabi’s ideas about prayer, but emphasize for now in your mind the key

assertion: "Prayer is the highest form the supreme act of the Creative

89
Imagination." Inprayingthewordsofourprayersactuallyafiectandchangethe
world outside of ourselves. It is in prayer that the creative energy of God is
m not concealed from us. Our prayers are the words of our
participation in the ongoing creation of God’s world.

Just first to review what has already been shown about Corbin’s interpretation
of Ibn ’Arabi, remember first of all the Layjtgglf, the middle world, the 3m
("etymologically the ’carrying back’ of a thing to its principle, of a symbol to what
it symbolizes"). According to Corbin, it was (is) the "intermediate world of the
pure Imagination" which made possible "the prophetic psychology on which rested
the spirit of symbolic exegesis" (12). Corbin adds that, hyJQfipjtjpn, the m
"cannot belong to the world of everyday fact" (16). Transcendence means precisely
that—to be carried into direct communication with God above the planes of
everyday reality. We know that Ibn ’Arabi, as a representative Sufi, was perfectly
sure that words alone—the "effort of rational philosophy" or a "God created in
dogmas"-are insufficient. Only the rhetoric of the middle way, the home of the
Active Imagination, could help-the key to which is really My; to quote
again from a passage in Corbin’s book already cited, "It [transcendence] depends
on a certain decisive encounter, which is entirely personal, irreplaceable, barely
communicable to the most fraternal soul..." (44).

While Ibn ’Arabi, again as a representative Sufi, read many books (4), it was
his realworkofa lifetime to transform his everyword and deed into prayer. And
such is the true meaning of the Sufi quest.

Beyond these familiar aspects of Sufi thought on prayer, Corbin’s analysis

90
carries us as close as analysis ever could to a real understanding of Ibn ’Arabi and
others on W.

(l) One’sconceptofthelangnageofprayerdependsonone’sconceptofGod.
The Sufis believe in a "suffering and passionate God"-an approach which
separates them from the "rational theology" of all three monotheistic religions
(including, of course, Islam itself) (108). The Sufi thinkers (like Ibn ’Arabi), seeing
God as "affected by human events" (109), will also see him as affected or changed
Wm.Go¢masufiefinsGo¢bammhnpwplelcammwardmose
who speak to Him compassionately. According to Ibn ’Arabi (as interpreted by
Corbin), in fact, the Arabic word for God, Aflfl, can be derived from the root
yvjh, to be sad (109).

If this vision of God seems strange to us, it is only because we have not paid
enough attention to the hLde, the "saying of the Prophet," which are second only
to the Qoran itself in the estimation of devout Muslims. Especially relevant, as of
course Corbin is quick to point out, is the favorite among Sufis regarding the
divine mth_os_, his secret passion for the people of his creation: "I was a hidden
Treasure and I yearned to be known. Then I created creatures in order to be
known by them." Corbin suggests, "with still geater fidelity to Ibn ’Arabi’s thought,
let us translate: ’in order to become in them the object of my knowledge” (114).
Put another way, "God describes Himself to us through ourselves" (115). God is a
God who reveals Himself in being (whom he had created) "through being known
by them" (114).

The divine reciprocity-which is also m us, as we in prayer help to reveal and

91
create God who in turn created us in the field between, the field of Active
Imagination-J believe is the kernel of Sufi gnosis. Much later in his "analysis,"
Corbin comes to a similar conclusion in a very revealing way:
What Jalaudin Rumi [together with Ibn ’Arabi, the progenitors for
Sufi esoterism for the future] taught is almost word for word what
Meister Eckhardt was to teach in the West little more than a
century later: ’The Father speaks the word into the soul, and when
theSonisborn,eachsoulbecomesaMary.’Andthismotifofthe
Spiritual Child, of the mystic soul giving birth to itself, or in the
words of J alaudin Rumi mediating the sublime symbol, ’engendering
himself to his Angeli—this motif is so much a spiritual dominant that

we also find it in the mystic theologians and philosophers of the Sufi
tradition. (172)

WWW: this is an imaginative act which requires the
divine reciprocity of God searching for us while we search for him. Otherwise
there is mere supplication, words are only words, and no real ghptjt occurs.

(2) Gnostic prayer M God. These prayers do not merely supplicate
God, do not provoke a "change in a being outside him who would subsequently
take pity on him" (Corbin 117). Whatever change occurs m of the active
nature of the prayer itself. It is through us that God will do His work. Or, to stick
to Corbin’s way of summarizing thing, "his [the gnostic’s] prayer tends to actualize
thisdivinebeingasheaspirestobethmpghandfpthimwhoisprayingandwho
’in his very prayer’ is the organ of his passion" (117). This is the sense in which
God said, "I was a hidden Treasure and Iyearned to be known. Then I created
creatures in order to be known by them." Prayer is the language of this knowing.
We make God real even as we pray to Him.

92

(3) Prayer is Imagination; Imagination is Prayer. Ibn ’Arabi believed that "by
imagining the Universe God created it." Creation l§ theophany; "creation is an act
of the divine imaginative power" (182). It is easy to conclude, then, how the Sufis
are seeing "ardent talk"; if our own active imagination is hm; we can
participate (with God) in the imaginative creation: this is surely what Ibn ’Arabi
means by his idea of "recurrent creation"; having "untied the knots" of "dogmatic
faiths," (205) the aspirant can-partly through his own imaginative power and
partly through the power of God who is "yearning to be known"-participate t9_r
lit; in a "continuous ascension" (205).

Our own active imagination, this clearly meansuthe imagination which permits
us to speak in words and to Wis, in Ibn ’Arabi’s view, consistently
a Wan:

The being it ’creates’ subsist with an independent existence §_u_i

gm in the intermediate world which pertains to this mode of

existence. The God whom it ’creates,’ far from being an unreal

product of our fantasy, is also a theophany, for man’s Active

Imagination is merely the organ of the absolute Theophanic

Imagination. (183)
Not to permit the "intermediate world" to be recognized, not to exercise the
Active Imagination of the world between two worlch, would be nothing less than
the tragedy discussed earlier: when Averroes omitted the whole second category of
angels (Corbin 13), when the conflict began which "split the occident"-"the
conflict[s] between theology and philosophy, between faith and knowledge,
between symbol and history" (13).

We can only conclude with Ibn ’Arabi (via Corbin): "prayer is a theophany par

93
excellence; as such, it is ’creative’" (183); by this, however, is not meant merely
creative expression. Personal expression, except in the sense of generalized longing
or sadness for God, is not the point. The God to whom prayer is spoken "because
it creates Him is precisely the God who reveals Himself to Prayer in Creation, and
this Creation, at this moment, is one among the theophanies whose real subject is
theGodheadrevealingl-IimselftoI-Iimself" (183).Ofcourse,inallthisisthe real
meaning of the words 99W the mystic unity in diversity.
For it is in the gift of the Active Imagination, the place between, that God and
His people reach out and touch each other, merging (if you are a Sufi) into One.
Corbin finds in this another instance of the W. For, he says
(summarizing Ibn ’Arabi’s views), "It is our Active Imagination...that does this
imagining, and then again it is not; our Active Imagination is a moment, an
instant, of the Divine Imagination that is the universe, which is itself total
theophany" (214). And at this point Corbin can only quote one of Ibn ’Arabi’s own
"most illustrious disciples," ’Abd al-Karim J ili:
Know that when the Active Imagination configures a form in
thought, this configuration and this imagination are created. But the
Creator exists in every creation. This imagination and this figure
exist in you, and you are the creator (al-Haqq) in respect of their
existence in you. Thus the imaginative operation concerning God
must be yours, but simultaneously God exists in it. On this point I
awaken you to a sublime secret, from which a number of divine
secrets are to be learned, for example, the secret of destiny and the
secretofdivineknowledgeandthefactthattheseareoneandthe
same science by which the Creator and Creature are krnown. (214-
215).

In a sense it isnotwewho create ourown prayers. Is itGodseeking Himselfto

be revealed? As Corbin succinctly summarizes, "The Creator is one with the

94
imagining Creature because each Creative Imagination is a theophany, a

recurrence of the Creation" (215).

(4)1hePrayerasActivelmaginafionwhichactualizesGodrequiresaspecial
mwhichinmarwmodenmeaandwomenisatrophiedbutaotdeadThe
power of this organ, called by Ibn ’Arabi m when concentrated, creates
objects; it actually ghghggt the outside world in certain ways. In Corbin’s words,
"Thanks to the Active Imagination, the grostic’s heart [seat of Mg] projects
what is reflected in it (that which it mirrors); and the object on which he thus
concentrates his creative power, the imaginative mediation, becomes the
gppgtitipn of the outward, extra-psychic reality" (223). Put more simply, perhaps,
the gnostic’s prayer can help to create the reality for which it prays.

The heart as home for gnosis is of course not the physical heart. Rather the
Sufis refer to a sort of "mystic physiology," a creative and metaphoric connection
between the vibrations of certain physical centers and certain psychic realities, not
unlike the "chakras, or ’lotus blossoms’" in other traditions (221).

The heart as home of gnosis is, in fact, what distinguished Sufis from other
people. According to Ibn ’Arabi himself, there are thmg classes of people. There
are simple believers. Above them are the disciples of rational intellect, the
theologians. And above them are the "disciples of the W" the
Sufis themselves. Note that a "simple believer can develop into a mystic through
spiritual training; but between mystics and rational theologians there is an
unbridgeable gulf" (230). Neither the mind nor mere sensation suffice alone, but

thepathofsensationisatleastirntherightdirection.TheSufis,aswehaveseen,

95

follow the way between. Their prayers are the discourse of this place.

Our western rhetoric of explanations and definitions does not permit us into
this between place, where it can experience only an engendering silence instead.
But Ibn ’Arabi and Sufis like him spent a lifetime inhabiting and describing that
place as much as possible: the mystic "experiences himself as the microcosm of the
Divine Being," open to "recurrent creation" (234), willing to engage in M
According to Corbin’s vision of Ibn ’Arabi’s ideas:

This presupposes, of course, a basic visionary imagination, a

’presence of the heart’ in the intermediate world where immaterial

being take on their ’apparitional bodies’ and where material thing

are dematerialized to become ’subtle bodies,’ an intermediate world

which is the encounter (the ’conspiration’) of the spiritual and the

physical and which consequently dominates the outward world of

’real’ objects fixated in their material states. (234)
m the power of the energy of the heart, functions to "perceive the
intermediate world" (236) in such a way that mere appearances can gain the status
of Truth. Looked at another way, the activity of him is creative in that it
transmutes thing into symbols (243) MW permitting those
thing to exist on a higher plane of being. As Corbin summarizes it, not to exercise
the hm; (to let this organ of the heart atrophy along with the entire
intermediate world) is the tragedy (the loss) which has separated east from west,
the west from itself: "To ignore this typology is to destroy the meaning of vision as
such and purely and simply to accept data as they present themselves in the raw"
(243).

Again it is important to repeat: attempts in western terms to describe such

insights regarding the rhetoric of prayer are doomed to failure. "Transcendental

96

unity of being"-or worse yet "Monism" or "pantheism"—(as such words are used in
the context of western intellectual history) make it hard to imagine any role for
prayer at all (246). Only by permitting the intermediate world to exist once again
in our perception-only to revive the m the "psychospiritual organ" (Corbin
249)—can we meditate successfully on Ibn ’Arabi’s maxim:

BHehasgivenufifeandexistencebyHisBeinglalsogiveHim
lifebyknowinglliminmyheart.

Prayer becomes, in itself, the "recurrence of creation" (247) in which, even in a
public place, the prayerful person goes alone with God-in Corbin’s words again
"releasing the spiritual person from collective norms and ready-made evidences
and enabling him to live as a unique individual for and with his unique God"
(268). To become one with this unique God is also to share in His ultimate

creative capacity: the word makes real what it says.

mmph g the Angels Within: Pedagggical Imph'catioht

Sufism is a pedagogy; it has to do with a continuous creation of insights and
spiritual knowledge which is neither detached and scholastic nor personal and
expressive. Its central issue through the ages has been how to express a truth in
the process of being discovered without at the same time killing or
institutionalizing that truth. Its central vehicle is a rhetoric of the place between.

Furthermore, the stated or unstated assumption of the W of spiritual
disciplines continues to be that expressing discoveries about life creatively is the

m for language. If, at the same time, teachers acknowledge in the context of

97
modern institutions that as truth changes, language changes, the central

pedagogical issue becomes one of tolerance for ambiguity. Descriptions and not
prescriptions will predominate. The Mpg; of teaching, far from routine, will
create a continuous dialogic enterprise which will also assure the imaginative
integrity of teachers and the institutions in which they necessarily operate.

Before going on to explore the special tone and insights of Zen rhetoric and
the rhetoric of Ralph Waldo Emerson, it is necessary to summarize the practical
pedagogical imperatives of an emerging picture of the place between. The
following seven practical objectives both summarize what can be concluded from a
study of Sufism and prefigure the similar pedagogical imperatives of the ensuing
studies of "The Zen of English Education" and "Emerson, Rhetoric, and the
W of East and West."

(l)Inbothwritingandhteraturedasses,thekeyobjecfivewiflbetoteachthe
relafionshipbetweenhngugeandculture.Themleoflanguageitselfinthis
relationship will be to mediate between the past and present in the creation of an
ever-renewing Sufi-like sesnse of the truth, the re-making of culture, the discovery

of the future.

 

the focus will be on the process of knowledge-making rather than on personal
expression. This focus will happen because of the nature of assigned topics (not
only "how do you feel"? but also "how did you come to create just this expression
of your ideas/conclusions?"); and this focus will happen because of the nature of

teacher responses (not only "that is interesting, but..." but also "how would you

98
have expressed a difierent conclusion if...?" or "what specific words or structures in

the written or spoken discourse created in you exactly this way of responding?").
ln-class dialogue with students or person-to-person conferences with individuals
will center on the following key questions: "Why are students’lteachers’ responses
to events or reading different from each other?" "How are they alike and why?"
"What portion of similarities may be accounted for in terms of cultural
conditioning?" "What is the role of personality in language/expression?" "What
does it contribute to your understanding of the world or to your own experience in
that world to W events or reading?"

(b) WW focus of students will be turned to
the fluidity of rhetorical situations. Key questions for discussion will include: "How
much can a writer control reader response?" "What aspects of audience must be
taken into account-personality, cultural conditioning, bias, extent of education
about established rhetorical forms?" Once a piece of writing has been drafted and
revised, students will be asked to re-do that piece for a surprisingly different
audience: all children under the age of ten, all Japanese readers of English who
have never travelled from their own country, all novitiates under the age of
twenty-five living in an isolated monastery, etc. This revision of a piece after the
writing has already been done will not be amnnounced to students beforehand;
nor will the new audience be revealed. Rather, the element of surprise and
creative encounter will be maintained in order to prevent the dread consistency of

routine.

(C) W once again studcnts will be dircctcd

99
to focus on the relationship between language and culture. Questions suddenly

presented to students might include: "How much of what students experience in
the process of reading comes from the work of art and how much from the self?"
"How much of the cultural context of the writer is it essential to know?" "How do
students themselves account for varying interpretations of the same text?" "What
proposals can they themselves create to guide responses closer to a consensus?"
"Why would such a consensus be desired?" "Why are some American authors
popular abroad and not others?" "How do differences in responses to the same
works written in English from one country or region to the next reveal the
relationship between language and culture?"

(d) W (non-fiction. fiction. drama,
poetry), make the creative process a study in itself. In and out of class, in
reflecting on student-generated literature, questions will focus less on the texts
themselves and more on the process of creating texts: "How much of what gets
written is personal expression?" "How much is imitation?" "How much is original
or real?" "What is meant by BEL and what is the relationship between art and
reality?" After writing experiences and discussion of the writing experiences,
students will be asked to write reflections on the m of what they have
written. Several accounts of the creative process recorded by published writers will
be read and discussed. Students will be asked to create their own (temporary and
non-dognatic) statements defining elements of the creative procew

(e) W (and respect their conclusions). Students can
accept simplicity (writing is cultural record, writing is personal expression, or

100

writing is perfected imitation of received forms). Or students can accept
complexity and ambiguity (language is the ever-just-now-being-created production
of culture). Help students first to see what the Sufis meant when showing that a
received culture is a dead culture. Then let them choose between the world we
already know and the world to which language can help us to go as we Lem
that world.

(0 WW and Permit them to
come to their own temporary conclusions about these. Sufic implications of the
remaking of culture include that the job will never be finished; we have an
immense responsibility as we address language to each other; teachers in one
circle may become students in another, but to be in thjg circle means to accept the
guidance of a teacher and to be willing to keep searching for truth even as that
very truth remains necessarily elusive.

(2)Expectedrolesofbothteachersandstudentswillaeedtoberedefined.lf
the role of the teacher, as within a Sufi context, is to stimulate students to doubt,
teachers will need to understand, tolerate, and at least temporarily accept
somewhat "intoxicated" responses from students. What students say or write may
not be so much imperfect or wrong as provisional and hm The clearly defined
agent role of the teacher will be to prod students beyond what they already know
even if that knowledge is not the same as what is already known to the teacher;
his or her comments on papers or during class discussion might be "I see where
you’re coming from, but..." or "why therefore does so-and-so (either another

author or another student) say..." or "how would you change your way of

101
expressing this if...?" Teacher may in fact be the wrong word if that word implies
the wise one from whom emanates the knowledge to be learned; M is also not
quite right if it implies mostly inspiring on to winning-since cempetition here is
really not at all the point. Words like questioner, mic; or m1; may be more
accurate as long as they do not preconceive an actual defined epistemological m
which it is the trick of the "goader" to make unsuspecting students/initiates reach.
Kurt Spellmeyer, in his W (1993), suggests words like "motivator"
or "agitator” (232).

The role of students will also need to be given more latitude of definition,
Students, as they feel obliged to "create their own relevance” (Spellmeyer 232),
practically speaking will need to be given the freedom, eventually, to make or at
least to revise the nature of their own assignments, to choose at least some of
their own readings, to make their own conclusions, ultimately W
mum-

(3) Studentsandteacherswfllneedtondefinethemenningandvalueot
texts/books, including the ones they themselves make. If, in eastern cultural
contexts, the focus of rhetorical acts is on the producer of discourse more than on
the effects of that discourse on an audience, the texts/books themselves must
remain in everyone’s mind a means to an end, never an end in themselves. This
mayberealnewstoour students andneedstobethoroughlyexploredinour
dialogue with them. Such discussions may help students to see books not as sacred
repositories of knowledge to be unlocked by careful study, not as final

explanations designed to arrest doubt, not as expressions of personal feeling

102

merely—but rather as m to stimulate readers to their own expressions of
discovery. In a fully Sufi context, this would mean not to assign the same books
year after year as a protection of a fixed canon but rather to provoke students to
read books which, in the judgement of attentive teachers, are most what individual
students need to unsettle their conditioned responses to language and their ideas
about rhetoric in a creative way. In a nineteenth century American literature class,
that may still mean Mom Dick for some students-but for others it may mean ILe
W or even a string of ”sentimental novels.”

(4)Aeurrlcularobjectlvewillbetoexperlment,insnnmberofshorter
assignments mfiafianfenrhngumwithsggflfixofleglfimatemponm
to doubt and ambiguity. Some questions/proposals for student writing may clarify
the "western" way of responding to doubt and ambiguity: analyzing, classifying,
arranging, researching, synthesizing. Other questions/proposals for student writing
may stimulate a more ”eastern" way of letting go of the mind and discovering
difierent ways of organizing. Yet a third group of questions/proposals for student
writing may encourage a totally oblique and creative response to the same events
or readings.

An ideal assignment would request more than one of these kinds of responses
as part of the same assignment. To take an example, this time from a poetry class,
the following four kinds/ examples of topics could appear as part of the same mid
to late term assignment: (a) "Thoroughly explicate two poems while comparing or
contrasting their thematic focus; choose poems from among the following pairs of

poets: Gwendolyn Brooks/Marge Piercy, Langston Hughes/Lucille Clifton, Robert

103
Bly/James Wright.” (b) "Writers often worry about being ORIGINAL. They wish

either to modify tradition or to reject old ways altogether. Yet the identity of each
individual person is in some way defined by his/her cultural and intellectual past.
What poems by what favorite poet we have studied most successfully meet the
challenge of creative innovation? Has this poet succeeded by worrying much or by
worrying little about this very issue?" (c) "Either write a poem of your own in
response to one of our readings or, selecting a favorite poem which nonetheless
you feel has some flaws, re-write the poem in your own way. Explain your
revisions in a few brief paragraphs.” (d) "Looking back over your last three
responses (a-c), write a page about what you have learned about language; which
of these three topics did you most benefit from? What questions would you next
like to ask yourself? What three questions would you most like to ask other
members of this class?“

(5) Studentsandteacherswlllneedtoworkmgether,throughslongdialogue
abouhgmgemmmbegintofiuthcmselvesn'omthefeltduafltyof
learning and life. Far from insisting on the life of the classroom as separate from
"real” life, students and teachers will need to ask each other what it would mean
to conceive of language education as belonging to life itself; nor should we be
satisfied to think of language and literature as a study M life-a detached
discipline in its own right. To accept a detachment of our study from life is to
accept the felt duality against which our willingness to react sends us to the study
of rhetoric in the first place.

To make the goal of temporary triumph over duality or detachment a

104
pedagogical reality, it will not be possible for the teacher to operate conceptually

W from the students. The detachment or felt duality must, on the contrary,
become the very m of our language and literature classes. It must be
embedded in our dialogic methods.

In turn, to make such dialogue possible, practically speaking, students and
teachers will need to discuss/write about/revise their understanding of institutions
and the academy in general. I believe that students are eager to understand,
personally, the Sufi sense in which language is not a manipulative end in itself but
ratherapoedagogicaltool: to speakand to read andtowritcistoengagein
pedagogical activities which change our definition of our world, If planned,
predictive discourse cannot in itself help us beyond what we already know, it
follows that (in the Sufi sense) it cannot help us to transcend ourselves or be
among the Near. A clear belief in all the above prepares us to understand why
Kurt Spellmeyer, as an example of a modern researcher and teacher, asserts so
strongly that our pedagogies must carry us bgym our academic culture of
interpretations of interpretations directly into the power of making our own
meaning. A clear belief in all the above energizes our understanding of Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s rejection of the kind of scholarship that defines antiquity at the
“Pen” 0f the W.

Such a position of the language-making person in the world was already, for
the Sufi, akeyinsight. We have learned that theywere them they
not only believed in the third reath between: they lived in that place. With the

help of Henry Corbin, we have seen the meaning of the Sufis saying that they wish

105

to refine all their thoughts and actions into prayer. It is in prayer that the Sufi
believes he or she most actively participates ‘in the reshaping and actual creating
of our world. What we decide to say or write makes a difference in the shape our
world will take. Sufis actually believe, as we might, that the real and mime world
(what Zen practitioners will call the non-dual) has its reality not if it is copied or
borrowed or merely referred to and interpreted-but only as it is ge_aLe_d by
ourselves.

You may still want to ask—working toward the goal of students and teachers
living together in such a place of creation, the place between-what will we be
doing? What will we talk about?

What we will talk about is the simplest part. I will give you an example by
telling a story.

Once I had a very silent student. Let’s call her J amila—in Arabic, the quietly
beautiful. She worked hard as a student and earned above average grades, but she
was very unhappy at college: she felt not at home, as though she had come into
the academy from a very far place. Once I received from her a very clear and
brief paper in which she told me exactly the reasons why she had decided to quit
school. She was running out of money, she was very tired, and there was this
W-

I thought at first that she had fallen in love, that she was gong to quit school
to marry. But she explained the very different truth.

The young man in question was also in my class; he was brilliant, he studied

hardly at all, he got perfect grades, and he didn’t seem to have to worry about

106
money or the future or anything else. But he represented to Jamila all that was

wrong with a college or a university.

One night, while the two had been studying together for my class, he had tried
to rape her.

Now I remembered this young man’s papers for my class, a seminar called
"the Sacred and the Profane,” a cross-cultural survey of comparative religion
focusing on how men and women of all ages tend to make meaning in their lives.
In his papers he had shown his intellectual clarity and had revealed also, to my
own satisfaction, a sincere attachment to humane and empathetic and sensitive
values. I thought of him then—I almost said I think of him now—as a model
student.

Now J amila’s question to me was why she should stay in an institutional
environment in which a young man will be an immense success, will write and talk
in an apparently detached and convincing way about values and meaning in the
classroom world while, outside the classroom, she felt, these thoughts and ideas
had had little cfiect. Were there the two worlds, one of language and ideas and
one of daily experience? Had I thought of how detached my own concepts were
from the experience of real people outside of books and papers?

I am sorry to say that at that time I had very inadequate answers for Jamila.
But Idjg learn from her, convincingly, the extent to which a felt duality is possible
for students and teachers if vital questions do not become central to our dialogue:
"What '5 the relationship between learning and life?" "How can we make what we

talk and write more centrally personal to us?" "Is language the vehicle of creating

107

personae or persons?"

(‘) Contributing to a triumph ever felt duality will be revivified M
created to combat routine. But of course these techniques can therefore not
always involve planned teaching units or measureable skills. Just as the Sufi master
encourages neither self-indulgent expressiveness nor patterns of dogmatic
explanation, we can manage the tone of classroom experiences by encouraging in
ourselves the gifts of spontaneity and surprise. Classroom time will need to focus
not on what has already been discovered but on what is every minute being newly
found out. Surprise draws out joy and humor as opposed to predictivencss and
routine.

There follow two key implications. First, students will need to learn about the
m techniques which Sufism, it turns out, has in common with Taoism and
with the practice of western writers interested in the East (such as Ralph Waldo
Emerson). These techniques include an emphasis away from explanation and
analysis (telling) in favor of m: metaphor, repetition with variation, paradox,
sudden bursts of strange associations, or even new words. Classroom texts can
exemplify these techniques; vocal teacher admiration for them will encourage their
practice among students.

Secondly, teachers can pose problems to students spontaneously in both
writing and literature classes in order to encourage a range of responses over
time. If, in a poetry class, one day students practice organized explications, the
next day they can be encouraged to draw responses or to role-play one-act plays.

If one day ten Wallace Stevens poems are assigned, the next day an eleventh can

108

be given (which students have never seen) to encourage a sudden journal
response. Whatever uses of classtime are invented by teachers, these uses can
involve a creative range of ways to encourage students, when it is thought they are
ready, to find new ways in language to respond to language and ideas. If our
students know, on any given day, m what to expect in class, their boredom
will teach them more about detachment than about engagement. In contrast,
spontaneity and surprise can result in feeling the energy of constant discovery. As
Attar of Nishapur is often quoted, "The true lover finds the light only if, like the
candle, he is his own fuel, consuming himself" (in Shah 71).

(7)Alsocontrlbutingtoatrlumphoverfeltdualitywlllbeourownenhanced
abilitytorise abovetheartifielalcntegories ofcherished conceptual models. For
example, we greatly trouble ourselves about how to get students beyond
autobiographical expressiveness toward analysis, research, logical reasoning,
intelligent manipulation of abstract ideas, scholarly presentation. We may argue
about how many stages are in between or what to call these stages. Yet all this
may be a problem only in our dualistic terms, our attachment to artificial
categories. The simpler may be as usual the more effective: to teach writing,
reading literature, the creative process, the presentation of reasoned abstractions
as real and immediate responses to lived situations would help students just to do
the kind of work their situations immediately require.

As an analogy, we have learned that teaching language skills as graded
exercises has only modest results-from sentence combining to paragraph skills to

the five-paragraph theme; from description/narration to exposition to

109
argumentation. All have proved to be artificial departments of a whole human

skill and activity imposed from the outside. Similarly, what would happen if we
were to stop focusing on autobiographical expression versus public presentation?
What if we were to emphasize instead the problem-solving, world-making
possibilities of reading and writing in each situation, in the here and m?

In conclusion, our challenge questions to students when they have written
anything might include the following: "Who would really want to read this?” "Why
would anyone want to read this?" "Why shouldn’t your writing just be floated down
the river (or, in modern terms, just be deleted)?" "How much of what you have
written is an avoidance of decisive contemplation and how much expresses a
willingness to question and to doubt?"

To accept a Sufi metaphor for English education is to center not on texts and
on writing texts alone but on the creative process itself. The prophetic intelligence
can be disovered through searching for the We for it. We can seek the truth
not through others’ categories but with our W999; in the place

between, the Sufi pathway between the heart and God.

The Zen of English Education

You may want to ask what the ancient traditions and practices of Taoism or
Zen may have to do with the short history of English education-especially the
history of modern research on English education. You are right to be skeptical.

Furthermore, you will ask, what are the connections with Sufism?

One response is brief: there is no real connection between Taoism and Sufism,
for example, and certainly no M connection between either of these and modern
scholarship on English education. Research on literacy education and
philosophical speculation about the history of ideas on rhetoric can go on for
decades quite successfully without reference to either Sufism or Taoism or Zen.
And certainly Zen, especially, does not need western commentary: Zennists are
particularly suspicious of the value of language use generally.

Nor is this chapter quite literally about eastern contemplative traditions at all.
If you want to learn about, say, Zen, you should seriously practice za-zen
' ("meditation") under the guidance of a great Teacher. And if my own purpose had
been to seek Enlightenment (in the Zen sense of that term), I would not have
written this essay; it wouldn’t matter if I had written this essay or not.

In fact, any practicing Zennist would argue, the writing of this paper has
probably impeded my progress toward illumination in every way.

But you are still left with the same questions. And of course a short answer

110

111

will not serve. The long answer to your simple question—what do the ancient
traditions and practices of Taoism and Zen have to do with the short history of
English education?-—is what this chapter is.

Please think of this chapter as an experiment. It seeks to set the philosophical
tone for a re-env'nioning or a revising of a vision of English education by looking
from the outside in-by attempting to define the W in Corbin’s analysis
of Ibn ’Arabi, yet in a different vocabulary. My hope is that a radically altered
perspective may help us freshly to see the strengths and weaknesses of our
western theories about language and the pedagogies by which these theories have
been tested.

In seeking a "third place" from which to see in from the outside, I alter and
add to an important question Ellspcth Stuckey asks in her WM
Literacy? (while also changing from her despairing tone): "Why do studies in
language always result in solutions that are linguistic rather than social or
economic?" (41). I add "spiritual" (elemental, holistic, not only academic) to this
list: Why do studies in language always result in solutions that are linguistic rather
than social or economic or "spiritual"?

Much recent research on English education and literacy in our academies-
much talk about the philosophy of rhetoric—has been culturally monochromatic.
Redressing such a limitation paves the way for creative thinking about our own
most precious concepts of literacy and literature. And the seeds of a more global
or universal grasp of our own traditions are already germinating within us.

Let’s try being on the outside looking in. Stuckey complains that there is "no

112
place in western literacy to castigatc the forms of western literacy" (me Violence

W 51). I’d like to try some castigating.

In the process I ask and discuss the following questions:
’Can I defend my methods?
‘Canldefinetheundefinable?Whatis Zen?
*Whatis'thenow'inlenthoughtandaction?
‘MoreTheory? Howcanwedoseholarshiponthat

which rejects scholarship?
'East meets West? A Historical Evolution?
'What are the theoretical aspects of Zen language?
‘What are the practical aspects of Zen language?
‘Towardsalenrhetorlcforthewesternworld?

’Tentative conclusions?

W

I am not the first to see Sufism and Taoism as the keys to a global
philosophical vision. In his Sufism and fIfaoism: A ngmtive Stug of Key
WW Toshihiko Izutsu, though he makes comparisons sketchily,

shares my enthusiasm for Henry Corbin’s work on Ibn ’Arabi. In that work, as
Izutsu himself notes, Corbin passionately argues for "un dialogue dans la
metahistoire" (Izutsu 469). What Corbin hoped to legitimize was a holistic and
intuitive vision of the commonalities among divergent traditions. looking at Sufism

and Taoism together is an especially valuable test case since there can have been

113

few if any overt patterns of one’s profound influence on the other. Commonalities
can be systematically identified only from a third place, a third cultural or
historical perspective.

Yet if looked at merely in terms of traditional textual scholarship, assertions of
similarities might be regarded as pure myth-making. Such a view would certainly
emerge if one were to look at individual cultural and rhetorical traditions as
discrete entities operating only in a particular place and time.

Corbin’s method of "metahistoire" would regard individual cultural and
rhetorical traditions, rather, somewhat as metaphors. Each defines, isolates, and
exercises a certain important aspect of human experience. None expresses the
whole. In this sense, in other words, the same person can be a western scholar, a
Sufi, and a practicing Zennist at the same time-almost in the same way that the
same person can be a teacher, father, and poet simultaneously. Culturally-flavored
rhetorical traditions, each successful and essential in its own time, can be alive
severally in the same person as competing images of the same universality. This
may be why the thorny philosophical issue of unity in diversity is so interestingly a
feature for Sufis, Zennists, and modern Americans-though each in a particular
way.

Just to take an example, Izutsu, after a thorough and very individual treatment
of both Sufism and Taoism, briefly in the last few chapters defends key
comparisons. According to him, m—a vital word discussed in detail later-"is
primarily an exact counterpart of the Islamic hagg, the Truth or Reality" (470).

Now some would argue that such an exact equivalency is quite impossible; no

114
doubt an individual Sufi and individual Zennist, when presented with this idea,

would themselves discuss at great length the positive and negative aspects of this
equivalency. That is not the point.

The point is that, for Izutsu’s understanding and our own of what is universal
enough about Sufism or Taoism to clarify each for the modern person who speaks
mostly English, the statement of this equivalency—if not merely off the cuff but
carefully worked out— clarifies and reveals much more than it conceals. And all
such terms, from the point of view of Sufism and Taoism themselves, are at best
pale metaphors for the reality in the first place.

Even further to the point, more than one’s own rhetorical tradition might be
necessary to reveal itself to itself. Otherwise we may have scholarship for its own
sake without the life force that gave the intellectual life the reason to do its work
in the first place.

Naturally, Izutsu himself offers the best example. He joins Sufism and Taoism
on the one side together while showing how they are so utterly distinct from the
Aristotelian tradition of the West on the other. Assuming that "existence" is itself a
central philosophical issue—"which has always and everywhere been the central
theme for innumerable philosophers"-Izutsu concludes that Aristotle ("an
Aristotle") means by existence phenomenal things. "An Aristotle" begins his
philosophizing "from the ordinary experience of Existence shared by all men [sic]
on the level of common sense." According to Izutsu, the eastern traditions begin
the other way around: for them (“an Ibn ’Arabi or a Chuang-tzu"), ordinary

physical thing are but a dream. They exist, certainly, but they do not in

115
themselves capably reveal "the real metaphysical depth of Existence." For that to

happen, humans need "spiritual eyesight" (Ibn ’Arabi) or "illuminating light"
(Chuang-tzu)-only gained through "spiritual rebirth" (Izutsu 474).

It is for the WW that this chapter is seeking. Call it
"metahistoire," metaphor, or myth. We will have to understand how and why our
common sense western rhetoric, or Aristotelian tradition, is inadequate for the

job-or how it along with us might be ready for a "spiritual rebirth."

? W l ?

In the "Preface" to Philip Kapleau’s W
W Zen is defined as "a religion with a unique method of
body-mind training whose aim is satori, that is, Self-realization." Because Zen was
brought from India to China, and then to Japan where it was elaborated, it is the
"consummation of the spiritual experiences of three great Asian civilizations" (xv).

Very well, then: Zen is a certain kind of pedagogy which has an identifiable
history and tradition. Yet this much will hardly satisfy a western thinker used to
simple tags easy to memorize. Perhaps the best short definition designed for
western consumption is William Barrett’s in his preface to Suzuki’s W:
"If the westerner wants a handle by which to lay hold of it," Zen is "Radical
Intuitionism" (xv). Yet Barrett swiftly emphasizes that Zen is not a philosophy of
intuition. (Most commentators insist, in fact, that Zen is neither a philosophy nor
a religion of any kind). Rather, Barrett insists, Zen is "radical intuition in the act

itself...We see with the two eyes only insofar as we are also seeing (though we

116
may not know it) with the third eye-the eye of intuition." And in this process of
active intuition, the role of language is not to describe or explain: it is only to
point beyond language, beyond concepts, straight into things themselves (xv).

Izutsu would probably assert that this is not unlike Ibn ’Arabi’s intuitions
about the active imagination.

Suzuki himself insists that Zen "does not explain but indicate"; it focuses only
on the concrete and tangible, abhorring abstractions (10). It is in this sense that
Suzuki means (like so many other commentators) that Zen concentrates on a
higher faculty than the intellect (7). In helping us to avoid being crippled or crazy,
Zen shows us how to ”drink right from the fountain of life" (3).

Another approach would be to define Zen as the path toward freedom from
"any ideational representation”—cspecially any representation that makes us
believe in a split in our own being. It is an illusion to believe that we are living life
as though there were a gulf between parts of ourselves-between the finite and the
infinite. "The peace we have been so eagerly seeking after has been there all the
time" (Suzuki 13). Suzuki goes on to quote a poem:

Misty rain on Mount Lu,
And waves surging in Che-chiang;

When you have not yet been there,
Many a regret surely you have;

But once there and homeward you wend,
How matter-of-fact thing look!

Misty rain on Mount Lu,

And waves surging in Che-Chiang. (13-14)

Not uner the Sufis who believe that Sufism permeates all thing and lives,

though in different guises, at all places and at all times, D.T. Suzuki also believes

117
in the centrality and universality of Zen. To him, it is the life that precedes and

then continues to animate all religions-including the three great monotheistic
traditions of the West:
What makes all these religions and philosophies vital and inspiring,
keeping up their usefulness and efficiency, is due to the presence in

them of what I may designate as the Zen element. Mere
scholasticism or mere sacerdotalism will never create a living faith.

Religion requires something inwardly propelling, energizing, and
capable of doing work. The intellect is useful in its place, but when
it tries to cover the whole field of religion it dries up the source of
life....Zen is what makes the religious feeling run through its
legitimate channel and what gives life to the intellect.

Zen does this by giving one a new point of view on thing, a
new way of appreciating the truth and beauty of life and the world,
by discovering a new source of energy in the inmost recesses of
consciousness, and by bestowing on one a feeling of completeness
and sufficiency. (1 11)

Why might we have become separated fi'om this vital source of energy? How
can we, while avoiding "mere scholasticism or mere sacerdotalism," re-define a
rhetoric of spiritual wholeness or talk each other back into "completeness and
sufficiency"?

This, I remind you, is the role of the place between—or the perspective from
the outside in. Alan Watts himself, the other great interpreter of Zen to the West
besides Suzuki, speaks about just this matter in the early pages of his flhe Way of
an. Watts writes openly of the strange place he finds himself. He is not primarily
or only a western scholar; m2 agrees that western scholarship prevents
understanding of the "real" Zen—this even though he is writing a remarkably
western-looking book. Nor is he himself a Zen master, wholly alive within the

tradition of Zen; in such a case he is unlikely to have written this kind of book at

118

all. Just as he almost begins to apologize for not being a Zen master, Watts writes:
"When one speaks from within a tradition, and especially from within its
institutional hierarchy, there is always apt to be a certain lack of perspective and
grasp of an outsider’s viewpoint" (12).

How then are we to learn about Zen? If talked about from the angle of
scholarship, Watts suggests, we would "miss the point and eat the menu instead of
the dinner." If talked about from the angle of expert Zen practice, we would,
within that particular institutional hierarchy as well, "not know what dinner is
being eaten" (13). But of course! Watts knows the answer to his own problem-he
too chooses the third place, the place between: "For the relationship between two
positions becomes far more clear when there is a third from which to compare
them" (14).

Yet you may doubt that it would be a real Zen that we would be seeing fi'om
the third place. But that depends on what you mean. It depends on whether you
believe it is possible to escape cultural conditioning. It depends on whether you
"believe in" Zen. As Watts concludes, "If there is anything in this world which
transcends the relativities of cultural conditioning, it is Zen" (14).

Zen is therefore, among other thing, a practice and a tradition that shuns
institutions. So many of its practitioners, again according to Watts, "never sought
the acknowledgement of any formal authority" (14). In this sense Zen is closely
connected to Sufism, a practice in which it is also believed that wisdom cannot be
transferred within institutions or within books. How otherwise to escape the

powers of cultural conditioning?

119
In all of this—and still attempting to define the undefinable—note the almost

impossible role, therefore, of language itself: the very vehicle of cultural
conditioning! It is in this sense that Zen leaves us in a world in which expression
of Zen experience in words is itself a contradiction of terms. Watts quotes an
ancient Mag: "Where knowledge is without duality, without action, cause, or
effect, unspeakable, incomparable, beyond description, what is that? It is
impossible to say!" (54).

Abstractions or "conventional signs" will always be inadequate for Zen
expression since they are "like the cup; they reduce experience to units simple
enough to be comprehended one at a time" (Watts 27). Watts also calls this kind
of experience "central vision," the vision of the spotlight, up close and detailed.
Zen teaches instead a kind of relatively unconscious or "peripheral" vision: this
kind of vision permits synthesis and global perception of thing not even
consciously realized. Of course even westerners have some peripheral vision. "But
it is not academically and philosophically respectable" (Watts 29).

Oliver too would describe (though of course not define) the eastern, Taoist
practitioner as a "Way-follower": Taoism is an effort to answer basic human
questions in a way difierently than Confucius would (234-35). Oliver means, of
course, in W ways, since the Confucian tradition focuses on guidelines
and rules. Watts as well sees freedom fi'om convention as the goalunot to "spurn"
convention but also not to be "deceived" by it (31):

The West has no recognized institution corresponding to Taoism

because our Hebrew-Christian spiritual tradition identifies the
Absolute-God—with the moral and logical order of convention. This

120
might almost be called a major cultural catastrophe, because it
weights the social order with excessive authority, inviting just those
revolutions against religion and tradition which have been so
characteristic of Western history. (31)

You can see from this why the Way world is shaped beyond intelligence. If in
conscious intellectual activity alone we attempt to "clutch the world in its net of
abstractions, and to insist that life be bound and fitted to its rigid categories, the
mood of Taoism will remain incomprehensible; and the intellect will wear itself
out" (Watts 38-39). Or looked at another way, to really understand The Tao or
Zennist practice, one would have to become, "in a rather special sense, stupid"
(38).

It is with an openness to this special kind of stupidity, then, that western
readers and students can begin to deal with the strange language of Taoist or Zen
texts. To show what I mean, let me go straight to "the source," a passage from the
fIfao fIfe (4m g of Lao-tzu. I refer to this book as "the source," the horse’s mouth,
since universally this text is regarded as the primary sourccbook of Taoist thought.
A "compilation" which is "attributed to the prototypical Lao-tzu" and usually dated
around 500 B.C., it is the one book read by ”virtually all literate peoples in China"
over the ages (Cleary 2). Cleary also points out that "when the Taoist canon was
put to the torch by order of the Mongol ruler of China in 1280, this W
alone was spared destruction" (3).

Here is Cleary‘s recent translation of section eight called "Higher Good Is like
Water":

Higher good is like water:
the good in water benefits all,

121

and does so without contention.

It rests where people dislike to be,
so it is close to the Way.

Where it dwells becomes good ground;
profound is the good in its heart,
benevolent the good it bestows.
Goodness in words is trustworthiness,
goodness in government is order;
goodness in work is ability,

goodness in action is timeliness.

But only by noncontention

is there nothing extreme. (12)

In this section, Cleary asserts in his notes, commentators throughout the ages
generally agree that water symbolizes "having an open heart" (137), being able to
adapt to the time. As with Sufism, the suggestion is that perception of the true
way changes with time and place and situation. It cannot be defined once and for
all. In the latter part of this eighth. "chapter," goodness in its many applications
emphasizes that Taoism is not to be "quietistic, introverted, or amoral" (137). It is
quiet and active at the same time-already something of a paradox for western
thinkers. The language itself suggests also that Taoism is not abstract: it is seen in
the m of real people as they live their lives.

Izutsu emphasizes the same stillness in action when discussing the stages of the
spiritual life, insisting that stillness or peacefulness does not mean dead: "The vital
energy hidden . in the darkness of the root is actually motionless, but the root is by
no means dead" (413).

Similarly, the western mind objects when told, repeatedly, in commentary on
the Tao or on Zen instruction, that The Way is eternally nameless or that the best

definition of The Way is "Nothing." Yet the W is quite clear on this

122

point in its opening "chapter":

Awaycanbeaguidebutnotafixedpath,

names can be given, but not permanent labels.

Nonbeing is called the beginning of heaven and earth;

being is called the mother of all thing.

Always passionless, thereby observe the subtle;

ever intent, thereby observe the apparent.

These two come from the same source but differ in name;

both are considered mysteries.

The mystery of mysteries

is the gateway of marvels. (Cleary 9)
Here as elsewhere, the am stands for "discursive intellectual activity" (or
being); Nonbeing, the namclggs, "stands for passionless, uncontrived, formless
awareness" (131). Discursivc intellectual activity has its place and its usefulness--
much commentary has been produced within the traditions themselves; another
translation for line 4 reads: "the named is the mother of all thing" (131). But
awareness, exactly like "awareness" in the works of Ibn ’Arabi and other Sufis,
requires a different discourse if it is talked about at all, the special kind of rhetoric
discussed at length later in this chapter. To get to "the mystery of mysteries"
requires a different ways-as in this opening chapter of the Ta_o Te Ching, a
"gateway of marvels," a path between, a pass between two prominence in the third
way of which there is a different map.

For these reasons Lao—tzu and so many of his followers can speak of the
filings of nonbeing. Such is the only language we will have to point to, but not
explain or to describe, the vibrant life-unity of the Tao. Cognition and The Way
are both real, but they are not the same journey. As Izutsu explains, The Way is

considered Nothing only in that it is beyond human cognition: "Just as light far too

123
brilliantforhumaneyesisthesameasdarknessorlackoflight,TheWayis

’Nothing’ or ’Non-being’ precisely because of its plenitude of Being" (408).

Or Isutsu summarizes the reality of The Way in western conceptual language
in this paradoxical manner: Lao-tzu depicts The Way as "something shadowy and
dark, prior to the existence of Heaven and Earth, unknown and unknowable,
impenetrable and intangible to the degree of only properly being described as
Non-Being, and yet pregnant with forms, images and thing, which lie latent in the
midst of its primordial obscurity" (303).

It is no wonder that Chuang-tzu, Lao-tzu’s immediate follower and elucidator,
focused so carefully on the very ancient myth of the featureless face of the
Emperor Hun Tun. His two guests, emperors of the south and the north (of
opposites, that isuemperors from the world of named being), were well treated by
Hun Tun; these two were very happy to have stepped "into the domain of the
supra-sensible world of ’undifferentiation,’ the Absolute," in their brief intuitive
felicity. But the two guests decided that, since all men "are possessed of seven
orifices for seeing, hearing, eating, and breathing," and since they had been so
well-treated by Hun Tun, they would bore holes in Hun Tun to repay him. The
moment the holes were bored into Hun Tun, Hun Tun (the Absolute) died.

As Izutsu, referring to a large body of ancient commentary, interprets this
myth, when Reason, the "human intellect," tries to bore holes in the Absolute, that
is to say "tries to mark distinctions and bring out to actuality all the forms that
have remained latent in all the original undifferentiation," "the result of ’boring’ is

nothing but the philosophy of Names as represented by Confucius and his school."

124
But the fact that Htm Tun dies "means that the Absolute can be brought in to the
grasp of Reason by ’essential’ distinctions being made in the reality of the
Absolute, and becomes thereby something understandable; but the moment it
becomes understandable to Reason, the Absolute dies" (304-5).

You see therefore why we want to be careful not to bore too many holes.

The myth of Hun Tun also explains why—even though this may drive western
readers to distraction—the best discussion of Zen does not mention Zen at all.
There is such a notable book—and one written by a westerncr at that: Herrigal’s
mm which is ostensibly only about archery. As Fritjof Capra
says in his chapter on Zen in Wigs, "Herrigal’s description of
archery is one of the purest accounts of Zen because it does not talk about Zen at
all" (113).

Yet Herrigal himselfm offer a kind of definition of Zen based on his own
years of instruction in archery by a Zen master. His "definition" focuses on the
supremacy of experience as compared to commentary. So, even for this
commentary, I adopt his words as the best working definition by which continued
discussion will be guided: Zen is

not speculation at all but immediate experience of what, as the
bottomless ground of Being, cannot be apprehended by intellectual

means, and cannot be conceived or interpreted even after the most
unequivocal and incontestable experiences: one knows it by not

knowing it. (21)
Put another way, we should learn to be satisfied if there is no simple and clear

way to define the term or terms which will nonetheless shape our discussion. Such

a fact will keep us in the concrete, save us from complacency. As Alan Watts

125

frames this idea, "To serve their purpose, names and terms must of necessity be
fixed and definite like all units of measurement. But their use is—up to a point-so
satisfactory that man is always in danger of confusing his measures with the world
so measured" (61).

There is a final caution here for western thinkers. In the absence of a clear
definition, we like to seek approximate equivalents. This would be a big mistake
here. Many before us, again according to Watts, have made the error of
associating Zen or Tao with various "idealist" philosophies of the west-for the
understandable sake of making us more comfortable with ensuing discourse. The
Zen experience of life, for example, according to Watts, is not mgnjst. It "does not
think that all thing are in reality One because, concretely spcaln'ng, there never
were any ’thing’ to be considered ’One.’ To join is as much...as to separate." We
must therefore learn to speak of the reality as "non-dual" rather than "one," "since
the concept of one must always be in relation to that of many" (60).

We must therefore learn to speak about the "feel" or the experience of Zen
rather than the definition or meaning of Zen. This is possible for us because we
all live in the same world; we only describe it or point to it differently. Again
quoting Watts, he [any Buddhist generally] "sees the world that we see; but he
does not mark it ofi', measure it, divide it in the same way. He does not look upon
it as really or concretely broken down into separate thing or events. He sees that
the skin may just as well be regarded as what joins us to our environment as what
separates us from it" (60).

D.T. Suzuki quotes the very western mystic Eckhart: "Simple people conceive

126
thatwearetoseeGodasifHestoodonthatsideandweonthis.Itisnotso;

God and I are one in the act of my perceiving him" (113).

W' ' o 'o

The unity of thought and action coupled with the relative irrelevance of
discourse about that unity are key features of Zen practice. I envision the purpose
of the Zen approach to life this way: its discipline and hard work result in a very-
present spontaneity; its spiritual and linguistic training seek to restore the unity of
thought and action.

Toshihiko Izutsu attributes to Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu the "Great Doubt"
(312), the question about whether an artificial order imposed on reality, most
usuaflyinwordacaneverbesuperiorinvaluetothevirtualchaos
(undifl'erentiation) of actual experience in time. To the Chinese masters, the
reality of being is chaos, while the "malady" of Reason is to insist on an artificial
order (310). Such an order may have the benefit of comfort or conventional
guidance, but it is not real. Worse yet, conventional wisdom likely leads to a
confusion of cleverness with understanding.

A simple way to describe this confusion is to refer to Benjamin Hoff’s 11;;
MM a particularly clear introduction for western readers to the relevant
issues here:

"Rabbit’s clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit’s clever."
"And he has Brain."

"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain."
There was a long silence.

127

"I suppose," said Pooh, "that that’s why he never
understands anything." (15)

Understanding happens not in the cleverness of discussion—certainly not in the
objective distance of planned analysis. Understanding, as the real gift of an
experienced life, happens NOW.

Once more to refer to Benjamin Hoff, in his sequel to W called
W not without reason he quotes frequently from Henry David
Thoreau, surely among the most Zen of western writers. Here’s an example:

By closing the eyes and slumbering, and consenting to be deceived

by shows, men establish and confirm their daily life of routine and

habit everywhere, which still is built on purely illusory foundations.

Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more

clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think they are

wiser by experience, that is, by failure....Men esteem truth remote, in

the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam

and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true

and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now

and here. God himself culminates in the present moment, and will

never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are able

to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual

instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us. (144-145)
This is surely a passage pregnant with Zen messages. (1) A conventional life of
"routine and habit" is the mere shadow of the life that is possible. (2) Children,
like the Pooh Bear in the previous passage, know more than we give them credit
for since they live life now without reference to lots of discourse about the past or
present. (3) Truth, far from remote, is everywhere around and in us. (4) To live in
that Truth requires only the fragile power of escaping from conventions, especially
from what everybody else has said, into the unity of the present, "the perpetual

instillinganddrenchingoftherealitythatsurroundsus."

128
I know for myself that to restore the unity of thought and action is an energy

badly needed among those who research modern English education and among
those who practice and revise its pedagogies. I think, for example, of my
disappointment in the closing pages of Ellspcth Stuckey’s jibe Violenge of
Lim- After ruthlessly analyzing and conceptualizing the violence of literacy in
our time, she repeats despairingly "What to do? What to do?" In other words, now
that we unveil our own ideas and rationally develop elaborate ideas about our
ideas, what do we do? Lived Zen experience may be able to teach us to overcome
this debilitating duality.

To clarify what I mean, let me just remind you of Ohmann’s much earlier
analysis of literacy as social control. I refer to what he calls "the problem of
problems" (88). By this he means that as we define problems only historically and
intellectually, we can remain "above our [own] circumstances," at home in our
intellectual circumstances-researchers answering to researchers-while remaining
W We don’t have to do anything. In writing this
paper I am only slightly avoiding my western penchant for technical and
peripheral issues-always at the expense of simple and basic ones.

Only now do I begin to see more wholly what Robert Scholes really meant in
his W. Scholes analyzes a hierarchy, a step by step cognitive and
linguistic progression, from reading to interpretation to criticism. Few get to the
level of criticism, he asserts (39), because teachers-4n their veneration for texts
and for textual interpretations (and Zennists would say, delusion)—-shy away from

"the rendering of accounts that are themselves abstractions from the cultural text,

129
versions of social reality for our consideration. The point is whether or not we are

wflflngtoopenlydiscuumorethanoneversionofcultumlreality.Todosoisto
risk subversion" (39—40).

In this sense Zen masters are forever subversive. Through their approach to
reality and language they seek to bring their "students" into timeless awareness of
reality (ironically, with the help of language) in an experience which is completely
personal: no text exists to predict its outcome or to measure its results. What
happens is not interpretive or intellectual; it is not anti-intellectual either. It just 'g.

It is also in this sense that Zen focuses on m Non-action does not
mean doing nothing; but it does also not mean asking, as Stuckey does so
despairingly, "What to do?" It means doing what we do.

It has been noted in many places that the nineteenth century approach to
language, of which we are still in many ways the inheritors in western education,
suggests that knowledge pm experience; knowledge precedes writing. One
follows the rules, the forms (let’s say for a comparison and contrast essay). And
this means that students do not have to think lbr themselves since the invention
stage of the rhetorical process is already taken care of. The Zen approach to
English education could solve this problem instantly. For the Zen approach to
language and experience is an inventigg.

The M of living in the present completely enough so that life becomes all
invention doesn’t sound so hard. But to do so requires, I’m sure, years of practice
and experience. Our concepts, our thoughts, our interpretations keep cropping up

and getting in the way. As Lao-tzu says in the seventeenth chapter of his flag 1';

130
thng, "When faith is insufficient] and there is disbelief,/ it is from the high value
placed on words" (Cleary 18). Discussion, discursiveness, arrests spontaneity.

What the W recommends instead is "Open awareness"
(Commentary on the sixth chapter, Cleary l36)-—a sort of natural breathing and
poise of the mind. On the subject of the "valley spirit" (a metaphor for this "open
awareness"), the sixth chapter concludes: "Continuous, on the brink of existence,/
to put it into practice, don’t try to force it" (11). This is because it "eludes the
contrivances of formal intellect" (Commentary in Cleary 137).

In D.T. Suzuki’s introduction to Herrigal’s book on archery, he remarks that-
for any art, not just archery—technical knowledge is never enough (10). Zen is too
simple for that-a working of the "everyday mind" (1 1), freed from any effort to
conceptualize. As long as Herrigal thought about what he was doing-wondering
what the teacher would think, adding up the steps he needed to take to shoot the
arrow cleanly and decisively, comparing himself to other students—he failed. Many
years of discipline went on before he stopped being paralyzed by his own separate
thoughts. His success came only when "the hitter and the hit" were no longer
separate objects but were a part of the same reality (10); Herrigal was returned to
his own "childlikeness" (13), a self-forgetfulness.

In the introduction to Herrigal’s book, Suzuki summarizes this way:

Zen is the "everyday mind" as was proclaimed by Baso (died 788);
this "everyday mind" is no more than "sleeping when tired, eating
when hungry." As soon as we reflect, delrberate, and conceptualize,
the original unconsciousness is lost and a thought interferes. We no

longer eat while eating, we no longer sleep while sleeping. (I 1)

But remember that this state being described is not really one of quiescent non-

131
action. We are not talking about oblivion or passivity. We are talking about doing

what we already do, but completely. Nor is this abolishing "the habit of the
veneration of Mind" (Izutsu 342) some kind of negative anti-intellectualism. It is
not a "negative state of non-movement" but rather "a dynamic non-movement full
of inner ontological tensions, and concealing within itself infinite possibilities of
movement and action" (Izutsu 349).

Izutsu’s own translation from Chuang-tzu offers the best summary for further
contemplation; here Chuang-tzu is describing the spiritual stage which makes
understanding (not cleverness) possible:

After he had put Life outside his mind (his inner eye was opened
just as) the first light of dawn breaks through (the darkness of
night) (349)

v r e- ?

Detach from learning and you have no worries.

How far apart are yes and yeah?

How far apart are good and bad?

The thing people fear cannot but be feared.

Wild indeed the uncentered!

Mine is indeed the mind of an ignoramus

in its tmadulterated simplicity.

(Exerpts from Chapter 20 of the W
Cleary 20)

For learning you gain daily;

for the Way you lose daily.

Losing and losing,

thus you reach noncontrivance;

be uncontrived and nothing is not done...

(From Chapter 48 of the m
Cleary 38)

132
By "learning" here is meant "habituation to convention" (Cleary 144). Zen is

the amt-a process which may be long and arduous. It is a lot of work to
become, in a special sense, stupid again.

To become in this sense stupid again means shedding psychological barriers
or, in even more western terms, "overcoming conditioning" (Cleary 153). To reach
noncontrivance is to have become free from habituation to particular conceptual
categories.

It is not hard to see the irony. I am not the first to write somewhat
academically about a world view that scorns criticism. While gaining daily, I pay
the price: for awhile at least, I have to lose as much as or more than I gain.

No doubt western observers are put off at first by hostility to rational
discourse. Quite rightly we know of the richness of our own tradition of
commentary and even commentary on commentary. We are trained to be good at
it. It may even give us pleasure. Yet the very activity by which we most want to
know Zen acts as a repellent: the more we gain, the more we lose.

How is it, then, that we can excuse scholarship or even speculation about a
field of endeavor so allergic to analysis?

Kutz and Roskelly describe exactly what a Zen master seeks to do when they
define what they call the teacher’s task: "to inquire into the relationship between
what students know and what they can express" (33). Egg: If you can’t say it, you
don’t know it. Iggy We know more than we can say. Kutz and Roskelly, as
western researchers, assert: "Language is an inherent part of the process of

conceptualization" (35). My exposure to Zen leads me to conclude that Zennists

133
would think (though not assert): Language is not an embodiment of concept or
realitybutanecessaryaspectofthemofknowing.

How else could we explain the richness of Zen literature-including, as we
shall see, poems, lectures, and even lengthy commentaries? These literary pieces,
often themselves guarded as self-sufficient treasures, may be useful to those who
are capable of using them (but dangerous, as in the Sufi tradition as well) to those
who are unprepared to read them. In the pm of knowing, Zen writing are
likely to have two key purposes, as we shall see: (a) to startle novices out of their
conditioned complacency; (b) to settle those who have once achieved awareness
into comfort with their abnormality. It may even be suggested that the job of Zen
writing is to ensure abnormality.

Where, you may ask, does this leave me? Is this ethnography I’m doing, if you
want a western term? Kutz and Roskelly note, "An ethnographer can never
eliminate personal perspective entirely, but he can learn to use that perspective to
make him more aware of others" (29). So this is not Zen, but Zen as a metaphor,
a difierently colored filter through which I am looking. Looking that way could
help us become aware of others’ perspectives; but also I may be writing myself
into awareness of my own cultural determinism.

Exploring a place between, I am still aware of the central problem. A famous
quote from Chuang-tzu defines this problem best: "A well frog cannot imagine the
ocean, nor can a summer insect conceive of ice. How then can a scholar
understand the Tao? He is restricted by his own learning" (In Hoff 24). Similarly,

"A dog is not reckoned good because he barks well, and a man is not reckoned

134
wise because he speaks skillfully" (Chuang-tzu in Capra 101).

A scholar cannot understand the Tao. So I will have to be careful not quite to
be one.

Herrigal, in his M wrote about how he had tried for
many months much too hard: he had tried too hard to understand what he was
doing, to observe too intenselywhat hewas notdoing, to talkit all out to himself
inwords. Onlywhenhehad learnedngttothinktoohard did he achieve
perfection in his art (40). He needed not to understand but to experience the
unity of the bitter and the hit.

Partly it is a question of deciding what is important and what it is not
importanttoknow.Anditisnotaquestionofproving.Thisisthepart,directly
related to western ideas of rhetoric, which it is so hard for scholarship to deal
with.

In WWW‘E Robert T. Oliver
carefully distinguishes, for the sake of western research, the rhetoric of the ancient
East from the rhetoric of the ancient West—a parting of the ways which he and
others see as the origin of our western inability to really grasp the distinctiveness
of our own western rhetorical tradition. In his chapter on "The Rhetorical
Influence of Gautama Buddha," for example, Oliver focuses on the Buddha’s
admonition: "Depart from the insignificant," an admonition central to the flavor
andacfivityofBuddhismasitinfluencedafltheEastandfinaflycrystalizemthe
Japanese Zen tradition.

What does this one admonition mean for the MEI influence of

135
Buddhism? At the outset it focuses rhetoric wholly upon consequentials." By

"consequentials," of course, Buddha would have meant the essentials of spiritual
evolution. The [11919119 of this evolution would almost totally concentrate on the
speaker much more than the bearer. According to Oliver, "In the view of the
Buddha, there is not an ethic m rhetoric but an ethic 9f rhetoric. Whatever may
be said has direct consequences not alone (or even especially) for the bearer, but
more explicitly and inevitably for the speaker himself" (75-77). In Oliver’s opinion
this is much different from the historical tradition of western rhetoric in which
persuasion is central (77).

looking at the job of language this way within the setting of a community of
speakers/learners/teachers would draw people 31a! from externals (not into their
clarification and classification as in the West). Or, put by Oliver in a different way,
rhetoric would "adjust people to circumstances, rather than to try to adjust
circumstances to people" (78).

The second major efiect of the Buddha’s admonitions on the historical
development of rhetoric in the East was to discourage persuasion while
emphasizing "expository discourse"; the felt or experienced constant contradiction
"between essential truth and its apparent contradictions demanded constant and
exhaustive efforts of elucidation" (Oliver 78). Repeated explanations or
categorizations simply did not match up with actual experience. Disputation based
on logical analysis only served, in this rhetorical tradition, to widen the gap
between knowledge and experience. As Benjamin Hoff writes in W

"Isn’t the knowledge that comes from experience more valuable than knowledge

136

that doesn’t? It seems fairly obvious to some of us that a lot of scholars need to
go outside and sniff around—walk through the grass, talk to the animals. That sort
of thing.

’Lots of people talk to the animals,’ said Pooh.

’Maybe, but...’

’Not very many listen, though,’ he said.

’That’s the problem,’ he added.
In other worm, you might say that there is more to Knowing than just being
correct" (29). If truth "is an understanding that apparent differences are illusory"--
even differences between human speech and the talk of the animals, as it were-
such a concept renounces rhetoric [itself] in favor of dialectic" (Oliver 76). This is
the sense in which the famous opening words of the fifty-sixth chapter of the 119
m might be understood: "Those who know do not say;/ those who say do
not know" (Cleary 43).

Ultimately, rhetoric for Gautama involves a redefinition or redirection of our
understanding of the nature of personhood. His conclusions and his practice focus
on the key distinctions between himself and the traditions of both Aristotle and
the Christian church. In Aristotle’s view, people are subject to all manner of
unclarity and "emotionalism," but they can be brought "to perceive objective truth
when it is logically expounded"; persons are outside of the world capable of
"evaluating it objectively and separately from personal involvement." In J udeo-
Christian theology, the distinction between persons and all the rest of creation is

emphasized in order to focus on redemption—almost an escape from our own

nature. Gautama Buddha, on the other hand, viewed persons as a part of a

137
certain totality—"unable eventually to perceive either the world or [themselves]

logically"; in this reality a person "cannot separate himself as observer from what it
is that he seeks to observe" (Oliver 78).

Why did Aristotle, therefore, posit the need for persuasion? It must have been
to lead others from nonsense to sense (Oliver 77-79). But such attention to
particularsmayblindustothe truthwhichisstaringusintheface.

Thus, in the rhetorical stance of The Buddha, the acceptable method of
inquiry is not logical-"not even mental-but intuitive. The individual cannot think
his way to understanding; he must feel his way toward it" (Oliver 79). Objective
clarification is an end forever out of grasp and, in a real sense, useless. A better
goal is subjective understanding.

Herrigal,inhisbookonarchery,goessofarastosaythattoexplainisa
betrayal of Zen (26). To really understand, he found, is to steer clear of logical
explanations, his method involving only himself, the essentials (27-28). His became
the rhetoric of the speaker rather than the bearer. But Herrigal shows how
difficult a task he had set for himself. When his master would achieve something
that Herrigal could not understand or explain, rather than just accepting what had
happened and living with it, what did Herrigal do, typical westemer that he was?
He started writing notes to himself about how the master’s achievements could
have been explained: what was the master’s "trick"? (37).

Herrigal too had to deal with the apparent contradiction of Zen texts existing
in a tradition without definitions. Slowly he learned that the texts had been

prepared to awake only those who were prepared to learn (24), only those to

138
whom learning the texts, at the same time, didn’t really matter:
To know unconsciously is best.
To presume to know what you don’t
is sick.

Only by recognizing the sickness
of sickness

is it possible not to be sick...
(Tao Te gm g #71, Cleary 55)

Not exalting cleverness
causes the people not to contend.

W #3. Cleary 10)

m Meets Wat: A fljs' toriggl Evolution?

In so many ways and so many places, evidence accumulates that insights which
could be gained from the East guide change and growth in the West’s ways of
dealing with its own great traditions-and the recently perceived limitations of
those traditions: in physics, in Christian theology, in pedagogy, in rhetoric. So
much evidence from such a variety of sources leads to the conclusion that the
West—whether always aware of this or not—is moving to an accommodation of its
theories and practices with the ancient wisdom of the East. Such evidence occurs
both within a body of literature (scholarship) and within the reported experience
of individuals we might know and respect. This is especially true if we accept the
evolution from West to East more as a major cultural metaphor than as a logical
proposition.

Writes Heinrich Dumoulin in W "The Dialogue
between East and West counts as one of the decisive events of our era" (7). For

Dumoulin this dialogue is less political than psychological. In his discussion he

139

begins by referring to Jung and his notions of the east and the west within us (10)-
-that is, the metaphorical poles to which, in turn, we may be drawn individually;
neither alone expresses the totality of spirit we may intuitively "know."

Speaking from a spiritual perspective, Dumoulin sees that the East has far
more to give right now, the gift that westerners need: the insight not of dualities
(as, for example, the subject and the verb, as we shall see) but of balance-the
"balance of stillness and motion" (13). We are already experts in dualities. What
we may seek without knowing it, "the balance of stillness and motion," is the very
non-action so central to an understanding of Zen, the meeting place of action and
contemplation in which wholeness matures. In the West we refer to body and soul,
inner and outer-for Emerson, the Me and the Not Me. In the inexpressible
moment of Zen these are one—even if a dialogue with words were the vehicle
which got us there.

The meeting-ground of East and West, according to Dumoulin, happens to be
critical to students of literacy and language. It emphasizes concrete reality versus
abstract thinking (17- 18); "the reality of being exists beyond all concepts and
words" (18). V ‘

That’s Zen. But that’s also Christianity, according to Dumoulin, in its respect
for mystery and for the transcendent reality of God. The mystery of God in
Christian theology "which constitutes the central core of divine revelation also
cannot be expressed adequately by human words and concepts" (19). Note then
the following summary, according to Dumoulin, of significant values needed by

westerners for which westerners are preparing themselves by openness to the

140
East—and also consider the implications for our concepts about literacy and
language:
Stillness and meditation, oneness of spirit and body, intuitive
awareness of the truth touching the mystery of reality-all these lie
deeply within man [sic], at the very root of his existence. They are by
no means the exclusive possession of Far Eastern spirituality, but are
imbedded (if forgotten) in Western tradition. We here touch
common ground. (2021)

A major case study in "the awareness of the truth touching the mystery of
reality" within the life and work of a western man is Thomas Merton, a priest who
travelled to the East both metaphorically and actually, in order to find the deepest
truth of his own western theology. In his study of Merton, Thomas Merton: Mog
m George Woodcock asserts that "if mankind were to be made whole
again," Merton believed, the people of the East and West would have to come to
some sort of "rapprochement"-especially among religious adherents from both
major traditions. As a major part of the process, the Church itself would have to
"open itself to learning from the eastern religions as in its early days it had been
exposed to the influences of Platoan and Gnosticism..."(151). To quote Merton
himself, "If the West continues to underestimate and to neglect the spiritual
heritage of the East, it may hasten the tragedy that threatens man and his
civilizations" W in Woodcock 155).

One can see everywhere in Merton’s writing clear evidence of a western
theologian coming to terms with his own theological tradition because of having
taken the east seriously. Thinking, for example, of the dark night of the soul and

his own early monastic life, Merton wrote of Zen training this way:

141

Onemightalmostsaythatoneofthepurposesonentrainingisto
push the monk by force into a kind of dark night, and to bring him
as quickly and efficaciously as possible into a quandary where,
forced to face and reject his most cherished illusions, driven almost
to despair, he abandons all false hopes and makes a breakthrough
into a complete humility, detachment, and spiritual poverty. (Mfitigs
We in Woodcock 166)

"Forced to face and to reject his most cherished illusions," such a person is freed
from conditioning, the bonds of preconceptions, and sees clearly, mm

mm the transcendent meaning of the Tao.

It is also everywhere evident in Merton’s work that he had to leave the West
in order to come to terms with it; that, in a sense, is what the East is for. Many
have remarked that, just as Gandhi came to terms with his own East by contact
with the West (the writing of Henry David Thoreau, for example), Thomas
Merton’s own development shows a person really discovering his West only
through the East (149).

This latter is the direction of the evolution which we are talking about here.

William Barrett, in his introduction to D.T. Suzuki’s classic film
defines the evolutionary shift among westerners toward the East in more
philosophical terms. Barrett assumes, which I think is fair, that westerners—both in
ways we understand the world and in the rhetorical conventions by which we
discuss that world—are inheritors of the Greeks and the Hebrews, both profoundly
dualistic traditions. In the Hebrew world, God stands apart from humans and all
the rest of Creation—in a world of dualism based on "religious and moral grounds."

In the Greek world, dualisms are "along intellectual lines." The Greek

142

achievement was to "define the ideal of rationality for man; but in doing so, Plato
and Aristotle not only made reason the highest and most valued function, they
also went so far as to make it the center of our personal identity."

Barrett affirms, on the other hand, that "the Orientals never succumbed to this
latter error." We have already seen how they favored intuition over reason,
seeking a center between the dualities of "reason and unreason, intellect and
senses, morality and nature."

What we all inherit, then, in Barrett’s terms, are "an irrationally nagging
conscience from the Hebrews, an excessively dividing rational mind from the
Greeks" (ix). Our MW however, tells us, when we are
at least open to the counterbalancing intuitionism of the East, that our ways of
seeing and discussing the world are outdated and incomplete.

As we shall see later in Fritjof Capra’s W in other words,
even in our sciences themselves (the prized training grounds of western
rationalism), "modern developments have combined to make our inherited
rationalism more shaky" (Barrett x). When we observe apparently parallel shifts
among modern men and women in several areas of endeavor toward eastern
world-views and toward eastern rhetorical traits, "these instances make up a body
of ’coincidence’ so formidable that they must give us pause" (Barrett xiii): Merton
and others in theology, Capra and others in physics and in other modern sciences,
and (according to Barrett) DH. Lawrence and James Joyce in English literature
(xii-xiii).

One effect of Fritjof Capra’s W is to clarify the inadequacy of

143
traditional western rationality and rhetoric to deal with modern scientific
developments. In Capra’s "Preface to the Second Edition" (1982), he affirms that
the "profound harmony between the world view of modern physics and the views
of Eastern mysticism now appears as an integral part of a much larger cultural
transformation" (xvii)—a widespread attempt to redress the imbalance in the West,
the favoring of the yang. Capra believes that we are everywhere witnessing a
"tremendous evolutionary movement" that illustrates the ancient Chinese saying:
"’The gang, having reached its climax, retreats in favor of the yin” (xvi).

To show what sorts of parallels he sees between modern physics and Zen, for
example, Capra only needs to quote from both sources. Here is just one such
paired instance (32):

The contradiction so puzzling to the ordinary way of thinking comes

from the fact that we have to use language to communicate our

inner experience which in its very nature transcends linguistics. (D.T.

Suzuki)

The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak

in some way about the structure of the atoms....But we cannot speak

about atoms in ordinary language. (W. Heisenberg)
In defining the "new physics" for readers who are not physicists, Capra can only
m how the physicists themselves came to feel. Systematically, experiments
called into question the most cherished notions of academic rational principles.
And "every time the physicists asked nature a question in an atomic experiment,
nature answered with a paradox" (55). The scientists themselves felt like the Zen
monk described by Merton: brought "into a quandary where, forced to face and to

reject his most cherished illusions, driven almost to despair, he abandons all false

144
hopes and makes a breakthrough"...(Woodcock 166).

When physicists had to describe the results of their experiments, they faced a
linguistic crisis too. What words to use? How to deal with a single phenomenon
which is sometimes more like a wave and sometimes more like a particle? They
could only invent clusters of words like Zen riddles: "energy packets," "probability
waves" (56).

We are talking here of a situation in which the rhetorical conventions and
patterns of the West are no longer deemed adequate to scientific inquiry and
scholarship. This is just as a western theologian may no longer find the rhetorical
conventions and patterns of the west, inherited from the Hebrews and the Greeks,
adequate to theology or prayer. And this is just as a writer of essays or poems (as
we will see in the next chapter) may no longer find the rhetorical conventions and
patterns of the west adequate to poetry or criticism.

In all these cases logical abstractions may be found only palely to approximate
reality (see Capra 15). In science, theology, and literature we may continue to
favor logical abstractions-but only because "our representation of reality is so
much easier to grasp than reality itself" (Capra 15).

One reason Capra’s book is so unusual and necessary for western readers--
along with other books designed for a large audience such as the two by Benjamin
Hofl', W and Wuis that it clarifies for middle culture
the evolutionary issues which are so important to it. As Barrett argues, the
transformations in culture over recent years which demonstrate an openness of the

West to the East have happened essentially in the "deep and high parts of our

145
culture" (introduction to Suzuki xiii)-that is, among the specialized physicists
introduced by Capra and men and women like them or among very simple people.
The vast middle part of culture remains unaffected.

That this is so places an immediate burden and mission on those who educate
masses of young men and women-perhaps particularly in writing and literature
classes.

If the "common ground" which Dumouhn defined is accessible to all, if others
besides Thomas Merton have access to their own west most perfectly through the
east, if we are to find a rhetoric for the modern world which makes science
available in words even to scientists, this way through the middle to the middle is
an insight not absent from western thinking about language and pedagogy. Kutz
and Roskelly, for example, enter the picture again. They assert that language
mediates between the learner and the world, shaping and extending thought. A
student "actively constructs a world, and language helps shape the construction"
(39). In arguing for this they contrast Piaget and Brunet almost the way I have
been contrasting the West and the East. They first describe the basic cultural
chauvinism of Piaget and his emphasis on logical reasoning: "The kind of abstract,
logical reasoning that Piaget valued in the actions of the children he observed and
in his assumptions about their development has long been valued in western
society and in our schools" (40). Bruner, on the other hand, "balances the logical,
analytic, and ’paradigmatic’ mode of reasoning with another, equally important
mode of knowing—one that’s intuitive rather than rational, and that represents its

meaning in stories rather than logical syllogisms and formulae" (fiom m

146
W 13 in Kutz and Roskelly 45). Real people may benefit
from both insights, the developmental aspects of logical western thinking and the
"narrative knowing" which Bruncr describes.

Whereas, as Kutz and Roskelly imagine, in the dominant model some part of
everyone is silenced (53), it does not have to be so. Dumoan looked at Christian
spirituality as evolving from west to east; Kutz and Roskelly ask "What makes
good writing?" and note a broad historical sweep: "Form is appeal" in classical
rhetoric, "form is all" in eighteenth and nineteenth century rhetoric, and "form is
function" in the new rhetoric (162- 165). The evolution of these rhetorics is likewise
an evolution from West to East.

What are the pedagogical implications of this evolution? Of course there are
many (see last section of this chapter). But for one example, in M rn J a : An
MW Anita Matson describes a unit on haiku in which
she has students go outdoors and describe their perceptions m saying anything
herself about the form and tradition of J apanesc poetry. Student talk can precede

teacher talk.

 

' _ Thich Nhat Hanh,
himself a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, contrasts "machine thinking" (12) and
mindfulness-thinking in compartments (48) versus direct awareness. Both can be
expressed, though differently, in writing-though the first kind predominates in
schools. Which of the two choices most promotes creativity, an activity we say we
prize in the west? On the kind of thinking and language most prized in western

schools,Hanhsays,"Iheraftisusedtocrosstheriver.Itisn’ttobecarried

147

around on your shoulders. The finger which points at the moon isn’t the moon
itself' (56). Or, as Benjamin Hoff writes, "A clever mind is not a heart" (The Tao

am 128).

To me the best philosophic treatment of language in the Zen tradition can be
found in T.P. Kasulis’ W Even though Kasulis is without
doubt a card-carrying western academic, his initial theoretical metaphor is
consistent with what we have so far learned about Zen practice. Contrasting
philosophy with religion, academic discourse with primary experience, Kasulis
writes, "Studying about Zen should never be confused with practicing Zen, just as
studying aesthetics should not be confused with being an artist" (x).

Nonetheless, Kasulis uses his academic/linguistic mastery of both English and
J apanesc to get to the heart of the diflerences between West and East as
embodied in the languages themselves; be concentrates on the word person as a
vehicle for revealing the distinctiveness of Zen relationships to language generally.

The Japanese use of three distinct words for M reveals that contextual
meaning is absolutely primary. That is, in English W193 can map both of
us as. transmitters, language bridging the gap:

a R b.

In Japanese, however, The R (between) is primary. It is only from R (the bridge,

148
the situation, the context) that a and b (you and I) take any shape at all (7). As

Kasulis emphasizes, the western metaphor we-are-actors-on-a-stage has no
meaning at all (9).

How then does the Zen Buddhist operate with language? As we shall see
more distinctly later, the koan (westerners would probably say "riddle") as a
teaching tool provides a basic example. Kasulis quotes the most famous of these
koans:

A monk once asked Master J oshu, "Has a dog
the Buddha nature or not?" J oshu said, "Mu!"

Then Kasulis’ important commentary runs like this:
The monk is challenging J oshu by posing a question with no
apparent solution: if J oshu responds in the affirmative, he is open to
censure for being overly dependent on traditional [conventional]
teaching instead of his own insight; if he responds negatively, he
can be criticized for egotism and arrogance, for placing himself
above the teaching of his Buddhist predecessors [since in Buddhist
doctrine every sentient being has Buddha nature]. (10)
How then does a koan work, since often this same one is given to aspirants even
today? Kasulis thinks, and surely he is right, that "the Zen position is that all
intellectual attempts to grasp the significance of this utterance will fail" (I 1).

A person must become one with the Mg itself, the yes-no, in order to achieve
hberation from the bonds of mere intellect. In the use of language this way, the
koan is meant to point the "student" to a religious experience beyond dualities
(12). Two key Zen themes emerge: words (concepts) are in themselves empty;
students must turn to the source of their own experience (12).

What all this means is simple to express but difficult to grasp. Conceptual

149

distinctions, usually expressed in language, are not connected with outside reality;
that is, "since language can never leave its own constructs and internal rules, it
cannot serve as a vehicle for philosophic M" (Kasulis 22). Words are essentially
empty of independent reality, therefore only capable at best of highlighting some
aspect while also concealing. This is why Kasulis refers to Heidegger, who said
that every assertion both conceals and reveals (24). Or, put in different terms by
Toshihiko Izutsu in reflecting on a specific text by Chuang-tzu, what happens when
a great lutist like Chao Wen dges actualize the perfection of a single song in
music and words? Then "the infinite number of other pieces which are left behind
become darkened and nullified." That is, even the perfect expression (if possible)
is "defective" at the same time; only sjlggg would serve to embody all the pieces
of music with Chao Wen would be capable of "actualizing" (365). Revealing
conceals more tlmn it reveals.

Kasulis’ conclusions stimulate the western imagination-or, in a sense, point to
a different way of understanding of the rhetoric of spiritual searching. What is
meant in Zen by attachment to conceptualizations? He defines this attachment as
"when one begins to understand oneself or others as equivalent to categories" (28).
How can those who practice Zen survive all the contradictions, even contradicting
themselves from one day to the next in what they say or do? Well, the
inconsistency of maintaining contrary views "seems less objectionable than the
absurdity of maintaining either view exclusively" (27).

How can those who practice Zen live with the incompleteness of their

personal or conceptual models? "Completeness and consistency are not as critical

150

as in the intended use and appropriateness of the model" (28). It is thus that
"without-thinking" can be the source of thought (140) and even that language can
grow out of "without-thinking" (140). The blessing is the spontaneity, the "artless
art" for which Zen poets, for example, are deservedly famous (141).

It is partly a question of the reservation or dispersal of vital energy. We have
already seen this point in the famous third chapter of the lac Te §h_r_n' g: "Not
exalting cleverness] causes the people not to contend" (Cleary 10). People will not
argue with you and cause you to lose all of your energy if you don’t make too
much of your cleverness (133-134). You will be able to stay on the middle course,
the between place again, through which you can journey spontaneously toward
peace and illumination.

Taking this course will also permit you, as Chuang-tzu was quick to point out,
to avoid the absurdity of your own language when clearly that language leads only
to further absurdity—and dispersal of energy. In the second of Chaung-tzu’s own so
called "Inner Chapters," he asserts that the "aim of sages is for diffused brilliance"-
-by which he means that the sages will avoid direct affirmations or explanations in
W (Cleary 74). Otherwise the sages would not be sages; they
would engage in fruitless argumentations to dispel their energy.

In order to suggest, by way of concrete example, his point (and at the risk of a
momentary lapse from sageness), Chuang-tzu says that he will try to say what he
means:

There is a beginning, there is never a beginning to have a beginning,

there is never beginning to never begin to have a beginning. There is
existence, there is nonexistence. There is never the beginning the

151

.stence of nonexistence, there is never beginning never beginning

the existence of nonexistence. Suddenly there are existence and

nonexistence, but we don’t know if existence or nonexistence actually

exist or not. (75)
Nor should we spend very much of our time trying to figure that out. Once having
tried to figure all this out, Chuang-tzu concludes, language itself would prevent us
from knowing if and when we had done something: "Now I have said something,
but I don’t know if what I have said actually says something or not" (Cleary 75).

Yet the question continues to nag at us: what are we to say to someone who is
asking us for explanations? How can we use our experience and our language to
help others understand on their own?
Once again the modern aspirant Herrigal, in his study of Zen archery, reports

on just this dilemma. He was M asking questions. And his Master was M
saying, "You are under an illusion if you imagine that these dark connections [as
between the real inner goal and the "target" or disk of paper at which the archers
had been shooting] would help you. These are processes which are beyond the
reach of understanding" (82.83). The two spent a great deal of time conversing
with each other, and Herrigal kept an extensive journal full of lame attempts to
explain to himself what had so far been happening. But there remained no
effective explanations. There could be only analogies, riddles, and metaphors-
aspects of language to point toward but never to fully express. Quoting Herrigal’s
Master directly:

Do not forget that even in Nature there are correspondences which

cannot be understood, and yet are so real that we have grown

accustomed to them, just as if they could not be any different. I will
give you an example which I have often puzzled over. The spider

152

dances her web without knowing that there are flies that will get

caught in it. The fly, dancing nonchalantly on a sunbeam, gets caught

in the net without knowing what lies in store. But through both of

them ’It’ dances, and inside and outside are united in this dance. So,

too, the archer hits the target without having aimed—more I cannot

say. (83)
The ’It’ is there even when not noticed. We know many thing which we cannot
say. Hitting the target directly, when not just a very occasional fortuitous accident,
is untimed and unplanned and unexplained.

But of course even this did not satisfy the inquiring mind of Herrigal, even
after years of practice. He still let his Master know that there must be some sort
of unconscious skill involved which could be explained if only it could be
discovered, perfected only if it could be analyzed and isolated. Frustrated, as a
Master would be with a western aspirant stuck on the conventions of his own
thinking, Herrigal’s master proved his lesson lastly without words. He shot at and
perfectly hit the target in the absolute dark (84—85)! The Master proved to have
m methods of communicating after all-but only when the conversation and the
stories and the poetry had pointed the way.

Similarly, Izutsu, in his chapter "Beyond This and That," affirms that, "from the
point of view of the Way, there can be no distinction between ’truc’ and ’false’"
(328). In such a situation, language itself cannot help people cope with a reality
which is, in Chuang-tzu’s own estimation "Chaotic" (324)—that is, beyond the
power of disputation to satisfy and clarify.

In the last analysis, human language is inadequate. And one must conclude

that rhetoric itself does not equal reality. In a sense, rhetoric has nothing to do

153
with reality. The role of language, as Izutsu insists in referring to both Ibn ’Arabi
and Chuang tzu, is merely to crystallize the world into the things which we can
talk about (360-365). Or, summarized in a different manner, "If brought down to
the level of language, the Way will immediately and inevitably turn into a concept"
(377).

So we are inevitably led down to the same conclusion in discussing the
theoretical aspects of Zen language which we reached in discussing how we could
have any theory at all about Zen. We are left with the one word Nothing. But this
word Nothing is what we are led to precisely because of our point of view.
Remember that, from the Zen perspective, this Nothing is really the fullest
existence (Izutsu 387), not a passive nothing.

If we must once again have definitions, the Zen, or the Way, is really the
Something: "This ’nameless’ Something, in its positive aspect, i.c. in its eternal and
everlasting creativeness, may be ’named’ provisionally the ’Way’" (Izutsu 388).

To speak rarely is natural.
Thatiswhyagustywinddoesn’thrstthemorning,
a downpour of rain doesn’t last all day.

Who does this? Heaven and earth.

Ifeven heaven and earth cannot goon forever,
how much less can human beings?

(From Chapter 23 of the W Cleary 23)

141129889 gn’ Zen Practice

Any look at language in Zen practice begins, not surprisingly, with a
contradiction. Takeshi Ikemoto, in his introduction to W
W quotes Muso, a great Zen Master (1275-1351):

154
"A monk who is given to reading non-Buddhist books and engages in writing is a
wordling with a shaven head. He is less than nobody" (xv-xvi); yet Muso himself
was a prolific writer of commentaries and poems!

One way out of this contradiction common to Zen masters, according to
Ikemoto, is to assert that book knowledge is harmful to beginners, but fig
m it can prove "of great service to him" (xvi). It is for sure true that writing
about Zen and all manner of intellectualizing about Zen literature appears to be
an impediment to the progress of initiates. In Kapleau’s mm
the author includes several interviews with both Japanese and American initiates
who achieved m (enlightenment); it is obvious in these that those aspirants
who had preconceptions about Zen, who had read books about Zen experience,
struggled harder and took longer to cleanse their minds of "delusion," the
obsession with intellectual distinctions. But it is also true that there is a great body
of Zen literature.

We must therefore conclude, as Ikemoto does, that there is a role for
literature "in the cultivation of Zen" (xvi), though perhaps this role is more vital
for the writer than in the critical approach of earnest readers. Ikemoto quotes an
interesting Zen postulate: "Poetry and Zen are of a savor" (xvi).

One way to summarize all this in western language is that "Zen literature is
the expression of the inexpressible" (Ikemoto xvii), but we are not to understand
from this that Zen is a kind of mysticism. Whereas Christian mysticism, for
example, makes possible a union with God, such an experience, in Christian

theology, can only happen if God wills; as Ikemoto points out, in Zen there is no

155
intermediary: "To a Zen poet, a thing of beauty or anything in nature 'g the
Absolute. Hence his freedom from rationality and his recourse to uncommon
symbols. Yet ultimately what he portrays is concrete, not a dreamy fancy or vision"
(xviii).

All the above begins to add up if one uses a nice western word like pm;
language is in the process, a necessary though imperfect vehicle which my permit
h'berating moments of knowing—though language in itself cannot express
knowledge. Ikemoto summarizes this way:

The Zen view is that Truth is beyond verbalization. Yet this fact can

best be proclaimed by language; hence the master’s readiness to

make use of it. They use language not just for proclamation of the

gin negative, but for a positive expression intended to direct their

disciples’ minds’ eye to the Inexpressrble. It is not a rare occurrence

to gain satori as one reads or listens to a sermon. (xx)
Language in Zen practice is then clearly a pedagogical tool, a mediation between
master and student, a way beyond language in language.

The language process in practice is extremely dynamic and energetic while
being supremely disciplined at the same time. Total attention to a koan given by a
Zen master, for example, articulated in a few simple words, does not in itself
bestow Buddhahood; "It uncovers a Buddha nature" (Kaplcau 22). The koan is not
to be M in the western sense. Remember that, "while most people place
a high value on abstract thought," it is the opposite with Zen, which "has clearly
demonstrated that discriminative thinking lies at the root of delusion" (Kaplcau
29).

D.T. Suzuki, in Chapter 6 of his Mm, "The Reason of Unreason:

156
The Koan Exercise," concisely focuses on the pedagogical process of traditional

koan inquiry (though "inquiry" is no doubt too western a word here). A
pedagogical process should, first of all, have a m we always like to say. I
notice that Suzuki is perfectly clear about the purpose of the koan: "to destroy the
root of life," "to make the calculating mind die," "to root out the entire mind that
has been at work since eternity" (138). This 1% sound rather violent, especially in
western spheres where value-free education gets seriously talked about. But the
end here is to nurture (that sounds gentler) the student/aspirant beyond "the limits
of intellection" (Suzuki 138). To go beyond the limits of intellection can happen
only by a process of exhausting endeavor—to adjust the whole world view will
require an event very nearly cataclysmic.

At firstuand again and again, perhaps even for years-the student/aspirant will
fail. As in any good pedagogical process, there must be room for failure. The
"measurement" (again too western a word) of this failure will mean dingngsis.
And, according to Suzuln', this too is indeed an integral part of the koan exercise.
When carefully the master listens to a student/aspirant’s struggles with a particular
koan—say, for example, "A monk asked Tung-shan, ’Who is the Buddha?’ ’Three
gh'm of flax’" (l34)-the master can thereby gauge "the mental state of the
questioner" (135) and know how to respond, what further questions to ask or how
long to maintain a threatening silence.

Alsoagoodpedagogicalprocesswillhaveagadedseriesofexercises
designed to develop defined skills. The koan exercise has this too. The

students/aspirants, repeatedly dissatisfied with the words of centuries of

157
commentators (in the West, the critics), will experience their own lack of
illuminating success as "no crack in it to insert their intellectual teeth" (137). They
will have to develop, gradually, other skills that they didn’t even know existed.

Furthermore, I conclude from my somewhat metaphorical reading of Suzuki’s
chapter, a good pedagogical process resists oversimplification. If it is a process
worth doing, it will take much work. As Suzuki says, the koan "refuses to be solved
under any easier conditions" (139). The process will require nothing less than the
complete attention of boil; the master/teacher and the student/aspirant.

How will the process end? How will master and aspirant agree that there has
been success? That moment will come surprisingly, spontaneously, and mutually
when—as all commentators on Zen instruction seem to agree-the intuitively "right"
answer will be given and, amid shouts of joy and laughter, master/teacher and
student/aspirant alike will recognize that the job is done (for now)-"instead of the
intellect, which taken by itself forms only a part of our being, the entire
personality, mind and body, is thrown out into the solution of the koan" (Suzuki
136).

Finally, what will happen to the koan itself, the words themselves, the lessons,
the pages of historical commentary, the lectures and sermons? All will be quickly
thrown out:

But once solved the koan is compared to a piece of brick used to
knock at a gate; when the gate is opened the brick is thrown away.
The koan is useful as long as the mental doors are closed, but when
they are opened it may be forgotten. What one sees after the
opening will be something quite unexpected, something that has

never before entered even into one’s imagination. But when the
koan is re-examined from this newly acquired point of view, how

158

marvelously suggestive, how fittingly constructed, although there is
nothing artificial here! (Suzuki 139)

Or there are other ways to "explain" how language works in Zen practice, what
long sutras or poems are for. Phillip Kaplcau, for example, asks us to picture a
typical J apanesc scroll painting with lots of empty space; in sutras "just as in the
picture our minds are brought to a heightened awareness of the white space
because of a tree, so through the reciting of the sutras we can be led to sense the
reality lying beyond them, the Emptiness to which they point" (17).

Or we could more simply just assert that the role of Zen language in Zen
practice is mostly to upset the conventional expectations that we bring to even
casual conversation. We can be startled into "awareness" even when we didn’t
know we were looking. A traditional example which Suzuki celebrates shows how
such a "revolution" may be stirred in our minds: "Hokoji (P’ang-yun), formerly a
Confucian, asked Baso (Ma-tsu, ~788), ’What kind of man is he who does not
keep company with anything?’ Replied the Master, ’I will tell you when you have
swallowed up in one draught all the waters in the West River’" (18).

The purposive disturbance of conventional thinking or conditioning, the
emptiness around language—these are not only experiences of Zen monks in the
mountains of Japan. In his The film gt Emacs Fritjof Capra uses similar language
to describe the experience of twentieth century western physicists for whom "the
bottom is dropping out" (40), that is for whom verbal models and even normal
sense experience are no longer adequate to describe properties of, say, subatomic

particles. In this same vein Capra quotes Einstein when that genius first grasped

159

the reality of atomic physics: "All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation
of physics to [this new type of] knowledge failed completely. It was as though the
ground had pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen
anywhere, upon which one could have built" (in Capra 42).

In observing this gulf between experience or knowledge on the one hand and
the expression permitted by language on the other, westerners-teachers of literacy
too—can grasp the Zen master’s purpose in using the koans. These koans are
mostly the outgrowth of the Zen master’s will to ' t ' to e truth in a
very few words. Sudden and spontaneous words, according to Capra among many
others, are meant to "expose the paradoxes of conceptual thinking" and to stop
"the thought process" (108). Language once again is thus used to point the
student/aspirant beyond the limitations of language—not unlike the process which
we sometimes claim, even in the West, is to be achieved through the concise and
surprising language of our poems.

The principles of Zen teaching, inadequately referred to perhaps as Truth, are
meant to be learned not just in the mind but in the whole person. That is why the
koans must defy the regular rules of daily discourse. As Kapleau indicates, "By
wheedling the intellect into attempting solutions impossible for it, koans reveal to
us the inherent limitations of the logical mind as an instrument for realizing
ultimate Truth"; they rid us of western duality in order to h‘beratc us to the world
in which we actually live-not our ideas about thing but the thing themselves
(65). The merit of language used in a certain way is that it compels us, "in

ingenious and dramatic fashion, to learn these doctrines not simply with our head

160

but with our whole being, refusing to permit us to sit back and endlessly theorize
about them in the abstract" (Kaplcau 64-65).

But the roshi, or master, does far more than merely assign a puzzle and wait
for the result. He must use his language to surprise his hearers into
comprehension (awareness), often in daily sermons at the monastery which
everyone attends—but even more importantly in daily individual meeting. We’d
call this conferencing.

The roshi "strikes against" the koan; "keenly aware of the different levels of
comprehension of his hearers, he pitches his commentary so that each receives
according to his capacity to understand, even as he relates the spirit of the koan to
his hearers’ common life experience" (Kaplcau 67). A roshi might say, as
Yasutani-roshi does, for example, in Kapleau’s transcripts, "You must look into
the source of your thoughts, thereby annihilating them" (71).

Language in Zen practice therefore exists in several dynamic new all of
them by definition unfixed and changing. There are the koans, the long
contemplation of which is meant to free a person from conceptualizations and to
experience satori directly. Attendance at daily lectures may help aspirants to shape
their relationship to meditation and to the koans in such a way that enlightenment
may occur more quickly. Daily "conferences" with the roshi may be charged with
just the felt energy which gives the aspirant the motivation to work harder (though
often the roshi just issues a reprimand or may even hit the aspirant in an attempt
to surprise him or her further into awareness). And there is a great body of Zen

literature which may or may not be useful in encouraging enlightenment or in

161

providing the material for ongoing meditation once enlightenment has been
achieved.

However, there is yet another genre of Zen literature-the so called satori
poem. Such a poem is written to express/depict/memorialize/record for further
meditation the exact moment of enlightenment. Such a poem is another attempt,
necessarily imperfect and not meant to replace the moment itself, to use language
to point beyond language into the Way itself. D.T. Suzuki celebrates this particular
example:

Onestrokehasmademeforgetallmpreviousknowledge,
No artificial discipline is at all needed;

In every movement I uphold the ancient way,

Andneverlhll intotherutofmerequietism;

Wherever I walk no traces are left,

Andmysensesarenotfetteredbyrulesofconduct;

Everywhere those who have attained to the truth,

Alldeclarethistobeofthehighestorder. (95)
In this particular satori poem are found the very themes emphasized above: all
intellectual categories are swept away in a moment; the new level of Zen life is
not separate from the world but very much alive in it; conventional language and
actions are suddenly superseded; this is the ultimate human experience; and such
a personal achievement of awareness can be pointed at in words, but words are no
substitute for it.

Closing with a satori poem, however, offers not only a summary. Doing so

leads to a key final point related to language in Zen practice: language in Zen
practice resists western romanticizing—or should for those who are paying

attention. That is, the satori poem has nothing to do with personal expression.

162

Personal expression would have to do with supremely individual inflections;
enlightenment has to do with supremely universal truth.

As usual, it is Toshihiko Izutsu who has the clearest way of clarifying this last
key point. In the chapter "Against Essentialism," Izutsu refers us to a celebrated
passage in Chuang-tzu’s writing in which there is the allegory of the Wind. Here
the Wind is not merely a beauty in itself or an expression in itself; rather the wind
becomes a "philosophical symbol" for defining "verbally what is verbally
inexpressible." According to Izutsu, the passage can best be understood if it is
remembered that the Wind symbolizes existence, "or the Absolute in its all-
pervading m" (368), its forever-changing and forever-moving sufficiency; the
hollow opening of the trees symbolize "essences" (368), individuals or individual
thing.

Here is the passage as translated by Izutsu himself:

The great earth eructates; and the eructation is called Wind. As long
as the eructation does not actually occur, all the hollows of the trees
raise singing shouts.

Listen! Do you not hear the trailing sound of the wind as it comes
blowing from afar? The trees in the mountain forests begin to rustle,
stir, and sway, and then all the hollows and holes of huge trees

measuring a hundred arms’ lengths around begin to give forth
difierent sounds.

There are holes like noses, like mouths, like cars; some are [square]
like crosspieces upon pillars; some are [round] as cups, some are
like mortars. Some are like deep ponds; some are like shallow
basins. [The sounds they emit are accordingly various]; some roar
like torrents dashing across the rocks; some hiss like flying arrows;
some growl, some gasp, some shout, some moan. Some sounds are
deep and muffled, some sounds are sad and mournful.

As the first wind goes away with the light trailing sound, there comes

163

the following one with a deep rumbling sound. To a gentle wind the
hollows answer with faint sounds. To a stormy wind they answer with
loud sounds.

However, once the raging gale has passed on, all these hollows and

holes are empty and soundless. You see only the boughs swaying,

and the tender twig gently moving. (368-69)
This opening passage of the allegory of wind jg expressive and beautiful in itself,
but it was not meant as a literary achievement. Rather, it is meant to say in
language, through philosophical symbols, what could not be said in any other way.
As Izutsu insists:

The philosophical intention of Chuang-tzu may be formulated in the

following way. The ’hollows’ and ’holes’ of the trees imagm' e that

they are independently existent, that grey emit these sounds. They

fail to notice that they emit these sounds only by the active working

of the Wind upon them. It is, in reality, the Wind that makes the

’hollows’ resound. (369)
The "Cosmic Wind" in this passage corresponds exactly, according to Izutsu, with
Ibn ’Arabi’s W or "spreading of existence." For both Ibn ’Arabi and
Chuang-tzu, existence is something on the move—"blowing," "flowing," or
"spreading" (369), never at exactly the same place twice.

Chuang-tzu’s passage continues:

[One and the same Wind] blows on ten thousand things in different

ways, and makes each hollow produce its own peculiar sound, so

that each imagines that its own self produces that particular sound.

But who, in reality, is the one who makes [the hollows] produce

various sounds? (369)
Ihnt is indeed the question! Remember that wind has no sound of its own; the
Absolute is, in its absoluteness, itself absolutely silent. We hear "the ten thousand

sounds" produced by the hollows of the trees; these are the "sound of earth," often

164

emanating from within us since we live on the level of the ten thousand things. We
may, paradoxically, hear the sound of heaven only behind the sounds of the earth
(See Izutsu 369).

The point for language in Zen practice is that we must not confuse the
hollows with the Wind. If we notice any sounds emerging from within, we must
remember that we are not expressing ourselves but rather the Cosmic Wind is
spreading around us. And we must learn to listen, behind the sounds, for the

Cosmic Silence.

1% A Mon: Estem Rhetoric for; the Wategn Woglg
Although eastern writers have written very sparingly about rhetoric itself, that

does not mean a dearth of rhetorical ideas. One needs only to make one’s own
conclusions about implications for rhetoric of major eastern texts. From these
implications one may be able to draw conclusions about positive effects knowledge
of eastern language theory and practice might have on theory and practice in the
West—especially in those instances in which western theorists and/or teachers
might intuitively grasp inadequacies in their own traditions.

Robert T- Oliver. in his WWW
Quinn, provides a rare instance of a discussion of major eastern texts as rhetoric.
He asserts, for example, in his chapter on "Rhetorical Implications of Taoism,"
that, although Taoism "discouraged bookishness" (234), the W itself
could be considered a book about rhetoric (235). Let me begin this discussion by

summarizing his key points.

165
(l) The main "rhetorical contribution" of the writing derived from Lao-tzu "is

their insight concerning the futility of argument and contention" (235). The winner
of an argument may actually lose more than he or she gains. A more successful
strategy than western principles of patterned persuasion would be to "surmount
opposition" by encompassing all viewpoints within higher goals (236). Consensus,
never in itself a necessary goal, might nonetheless actually be reached by intuitive
search for unity behind multiplicity. Or, looked at differently, the rhetorician may
surmount futile argumentation or self-defensive opposition best by calmly seeking
expression—first of all in one’s own example—of the intuitive oneness behind all
contraries.

(2) People do not m their way into harmony as much as they {:31 their way
into harmony (238). This would mean that effective communication would center
on symbolic, discursive, expository presentation. As Oliver reminds us, so
consistent with Taoist views, "The brain is no more truly an organism of man than
is stomach or skin; why then emphasize its importance?" (238).

(3) To the West all the above might seem completely anti-rhetoricalubut that
is because of our point of view. Passages in the W itself may denounce
rhetoric, as we have seen; but the very purpose of the writing derived from Lao-
tzu is rhetorical, Oliver insists, because they teach people how to adjust themselves
to circumstances in order "to attain the ultimate goal of both the individual and
society" (239). In the west we may tend to work the other way around—to adjust
circumstances to people (to force changes around us), often with an emphasis on

the self at the expense of society. In a culture which emphasizes eloquence and

166

persuasion, it may be hard for us to recognize that "when problems abound, glib
cleverness is as futile as inarticulate awkwardness" (239).

(4) Whereas, in the West, our rhetorical behaviors may emphasize the
aggressive and rebellion against "the fundamental laws of the universe" (240), the
opposite is not the non-active serenity which many see in Taoist theory and
practice. Rather, the opposite is a strange sort of mm which is hard for us to
really imagine-the "flowing into and becoming one with nature" (240). If, as Oliver
defines them, the cardinal "concepts" of Lao-tzu are "passive non-action,"
"mindlessness," and "spontaneous righteousness" (240), all three have rhetorical
implications. The central idea here is that people must learn to think, feel, and act
in accordance with their own basic natures—in harmony with them, without overt
or patterned deceptions. In such a way of life, Oliver concludes, "since natural
forces are genuinely inscrutable and nonreasonable, it is futile to try to
’understand’ them or to foster understanding by others." It is better to avoid
"purposive action" and to seek to live effortlessly (240).

(5) Truth, if capable of being suggested in words at all, will be understood
intuitively, never through patterned analysis. This means that "the insight needed
to understand truth and to communicate with one another consists of spontaneous
identification." Yet such spontaneity cannot be achieved until "aggressive patterns"
[of typically western thought and language], "etched by society" [convention] into
your nature can be erased (241). Flagrant individualism for its own conceptual or
persuasive sake would be the wrong way to go.

(6) lecturing or discursive presentation of facts or concepts as though they

167

were completely true is a pedagogical disaster. On the contrary, Oliver would
summarize Lao-tzu’s advice, his pedagogical-rhetorical stance this way:

Do not attempt the impossible task of trying to conform to the vast

network of often conflicting and never adequate social beliefs and

customs. Moreover, do not try to understand nature, either; for such

an effort at understanding would require analysis, and this would fix

upon the object your own mode of interpreting it. The recipe that

Lao-tzu recommended is simple to state, though perhaps impossible

fully to attain: empty your mind and be passively receptive to

spontaneous insight. (241)
While Lao-tzu’s goals may be almost unattainable, the rhetorical implication for
westerners and easterners alike is clear, useful, and immediate: attempt to reach a
"degree of sophisticated understanding" that would uncover the ossified
conventions of social and intellectual life in your culture—whatever that culture
may be—as the "artificial constructs" that they are. Only then in our life and in our
language can we find freedom, the spontaneous non-action which the Taoists
writers recommend but refuse fully to define. Oliver’s summary is perfect: "To
Lao-tzu the disfigurement of human nature by diversion from natural tendencies
through acceptance of culturally established forms of thinking and behaving is the
pathway to pretense, frustration, and futility" (243).

(7) The purpose of communication, in the Taoist tradition, is neither self
expression nor detached analysis. Rather, according to Oliver, "the purpose of
communication is communication" (243). Talk justifies itself when its sort of
undcsigned design assists individuals "to pierce through the camouflage maintained
by society" (243). Otherwise rhetoric will do more harm than good.

(8) Rhetoric cannot be taught, not in the western sense of "taught" as, for

168
example, a graded series of analyzed skills. Rather, Oliver shows, "the skills
required for effective speaking...are not ’leamed’ but are ’recovered’uby relaxing
into one’s own essential nature" (244). This view alone accounts for the special
flgm of Taoist writing or Zen poems. Style, organization and delivery are
"nonassertive and nonargumentativc" (244). In sum, "Ihe message that is
unqualifiedly true and that is identified with the listener’s own feeling will be
accepted by him most readily as he hears it set forth with utter and categorical
simplicity—with no qualifications and no argumentative supports" (244). At the
same time, one must not want too much for others to agree: that is a matter for
them; rhetorical presentation may be designed more for the presenter than for the
bearer or reader. "To think purposively, Lao Tzu would warn, is to court the
danger of imposing one’s own conclusions upon the matter under consideration"
(Oliver 245).

(9) One cannot pretend to present the truth in words. As Chuang-tzu would
have said (as Lao-tzu’s primary follower, according to Oliver), "Knowledge is far
too uncertain to justify its persuasive presentation" (249). For what then do we
have language at all? Speech is, according to Chaung-tzu, as interpreted by Oliver,
"the prism through which one’s identity with nature should be revealed. Anything
lessthanthisoranythingthatseekstogobeyondthisaimcanonlybeartificial or

contrived" (257).

Now, then, considering these nine points from the western point of view, any

rhetorician would probably conclude that Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu asked for too

169

much. The conventions of western rhetoric, indeed the norms of civilized life in
the 1990’s, would make living up to these ideas a fruitless impossibility.

I agree. No one would be so senseless to recommend that, having observed
the virtues of Lao-tzu’s rhetorical ideas, we should now simply adopt them. Doing
so would be directly at variance with these rhetorical ideas themselves.

Yet we also begin to observe, both in theory and practice, perceived
weaknesses in the received wisdom of the western rhetorical traditions in which we
daily operate. Let’s therefore go back to each of the nine aspects of eastern
rhetoric above to see what they could mean-in more practical terms-for the
West. What could we learn? How could these ideas help us to work on some of
our own theoretical or pedagogical dilemmas?

(1) To openly admit that there is more to rhetoric than persuasion would free
us in several ways: we would no longer have to try to convince our students,
hopelessly, that all we can know could be analyzed and presented in critical
pattenrs. The patterns themselves, if taught merely as patterns, have not helped us
or them to understand why so much of what we know cannot be satisfactorily
presented. What should any writer do when what is perceived does not quite fit
one of the patterns?

How can we continue to defend the idea to our students that the world can be
logically explained when their own experience and the complex discoveries of our
own western science point to the contrary?

(2) In the teaching of literature, the non-predominance of brain, if openly

discussed in class, might help us to clarify the real and felt distinctions between art

A _ ._,_.—A-—-_-4_-4 A

and

disc

final

lite

153'

ide:

of i
stuc

will

170

and criticism. Why is there so little work in our classrooms and in our academic
discourse about the sources and operation of creativity itself?

(3) What if we admit that "glib cleverness" is just as inadequate as stumbling
inarticulatencss? A public admission of this in the classroom could lead to a
critical discussion of rhetoric itself. What would it mean to students to see rhetoric
as both adjustment of people to circumstances and of circumstances to people?

(4) Rather than pretending to understand, define, or worse yet teach about
inscrutable natural forces within us, what would happen if we taught writing and
literature as though mostly (to use a nicely western, Aristotelian category)
inygntjgn? What would it mean for teachers and students alike to see language as
spontaneous non-action rather than purposive argumentation?

(5) In a group setting, how might an atmosphere of "spontaneous
identification" rather than rigorous inquiry promote motivation and discovery?

(6) Openness to what in the West we call "critical thinking" or "interpretations
of interpretations," if actually encouraged and practiced as such, might help
students to observe, each for himself or herself for the first time, the extent to
which we are culturally conditioned. Are schools ready for this?

(7) How much tolerance do we really have in schools for a kind of talk/writing
in which the "purpose of communication is communication"? Could we learn to
evaluate this talk or writing in some sensible way? How do we read and talk about
a piece which has few of the trapping of western rhetorical planning?

(8) How do we learn to run a classroom in which rhetorical skills are not

taught as graded exercises but as instincts to be recovered? Is there a place in our

 

 

171
curricula for "spontaneous non-action"?
(9) How do we define for ourselves and for our students a theory of
knowledge if such knowledge is "far too uncertain to justify its persuasive

presentation"? What is it that we really propose to teach?

We may not have satisfactory and quick answers in too many of these
categories. Yet these are necessary questions if we are to be willing to treat the
world, our knowledge of that world, and our ways of knowing about that world in
language in the state of flux in which they are. Not looking for the answers dooms
us along with our students to the feelings of disassociation which are very critical
among us—the gulf again between life and school, life and work, school and work,
feeling and acceptable rhetorical standards.

I too, you may have guessed, do not have all the answers. Yet there needs to
be a place to begin. Here is one simple example, again demonstrating how
knowledge of the rhetoric of the east may at least begin to help us to address
some of our own problems.

We could begin with a chapter from Suzuki’s W in which he
analyzes, in ways respectable to western students of language, the verbal methods
in Zen practice. These include paradox, going beyond opposites, contradiction,
affirmation, repetition, and exclamation—all, according to Suzuki, "tools" of the
Zen master’s trade.

(1) Zen practice could teach us about the value of accepting m We are

used to paradoxes in western literature and theology, of course; Suzuki cites the

172
example from Me'nter Eckhart of the "immovable mover" (1 15). But in Zen our

daily experience is all paradox: "When I pass over the bridge] Lo, the water
floweth not, but the bridge doth flow" (1 15). Such a paradox, remember, is not
something to figure out; rather, it expresses the truth of our real knowledge and
experience. In the west we need this kind of tolerance for paradox, as we have
seen, to deal even with the culminating achievements of our western science.

F ritjof Capra, for example, writes about the essential paradox of matter itself at
the atomic level—it is both particle and wave (136).

(2) W in the Zen way would free us from endless
disputations about differences, including the gulf between self and others. Are we
willing to give up our fascination with distinctions?-like the man in the famous
Zen story, hanging over a precipice, holding on by his teeth to a weed, are we
willing to open our mouths to speak?

(3) What would it mean, rhetorically, in a felt and expressed awareness of
Wmansweryes one dayandnothenext? Isaright answer right
forever? Does it matter?

(4) Affirmations might be just as regular. Zen or Zen-flavored rhetoric is not
always apparently negative. Sometimes thing are true simply because we have
said them and others intuitively agree.

(5) Bgmtition is itself a respectable rhetorical device. If I say something
frequently enough, does it become true? Suzuki quotes Meister Eckhart again: "It
is as if one stood before a high mountain and cried, ’Art thou there?’ The echo

comes back, ’Art thou there?” (124-25). Or Suzuki writes, "When the mind is so

173

tuned as to be all ready to break into a certain note, the master turns the key and
it sing out its own melody, not learned from anybody else but discovered within
itself' (125).

(6) W serve as well to answer questions as "intelligrble answers"
(Suzuki 127). language itself, in Zen practice, is in a way all exclamation—when it

comes directly "out of [one’s] inner experience" (125).

For now we could conclude with two passages for further thought. First,
according to Izutsu in defining the "Perfect Man" in Chuang-tzu’s terms, the mind
of a Perfect Man is like a "polished mirror"—-it reflects every object faithfully but
does not "get perturbed" when objects go away (437).

The second is a story celebrated by Suzuki in concluding his own discussion of
"verbal method":

Amonk...asked,'Pleaseplaymeatuneonastringlessharp."The
master was quiet for some little while and said, "Did you hear it?"

'No,Idonothearit." 'Why,"saidthemaster,"didyounotask
louder?" (128)

r en ' e c usions
In a nicely eastern way, for now, we could end where we began:

My eyes eavesdrop on their lashes!

I’m finished with the ordinary!

What use has halter, bridle

To one who’s shaken ofl contrivance?
(Satori poem by Eichu, 1340-1416,
in Stryk and Ikemoto 10)

To be finished with the ordinary, however, a person had better be ready to deal

174

with the consequences. To have shaken off contrivancc (conventionality,
conditioning), a person had better be ready to face the self.

If we, as western rhetoricians, are ready to throw away the halter and the
bridle, we need to be open to the results. Keeping the halter and the bridle just in
case won’t do.

Referring to William Barrett once again, in his introduction to Suzuki’s book, I
notice that he too does not recommend importation of Zen to the west: it would
come along with too many "cultural institutions" which for us in themselves would
be contrivances. But, he says, there are "thing which we could learn or unlearn
from it [Zen] and apply in our own way." It may offer possibilities of
communication which have been, for us, so far unexplored (10).

For us too the language of Zen, its rhetorical practices and its only-seemingly
anti-rhetorical stance, may stand; us out of our "existing errors" (Oliver 131). This
can happen if we are willing to contemplate its apparently bizarre or self-
contradictory messages.

We will be in the position of learners, as Herrigal was when he went from
Germany to Japan to study archery. He learned about Zen by studying archery.
We might learn about Zen by studying and teaching rhetoric. Herrigal is clear
about the teaching and learning practice itself: the student must be ready for the
lifcbelt before being saved (41-42). The accomplishment will take the archer, or
the metaphorical archer, "by surprise" (48). And key factors in the accomplishment
will be the centrality of the teacher, the openness to ceremonial behaviors (as also

in the classroom), and the value of routine-lots and lots of practice! (66).

175

Using eastern traditions as metaphors for our own intuitive longing makes
sense when we want to understand why wholly western perspectives have not quite
satisfied us. This is especially true since complete pursuit of our own rational
methods reveals so many of our limitations-along with the essentially non-western
aspects of the troubling discoveries our own rationality reveals to us.

Even Fritjof Capra, a m in pursuing research on eastern metaphysics
has come to look at Taoism as an analogue for his own scientific discoveries. The
parallels are amazing: the rational and detached observer of scientific experiments
becomes a W influencing just by virtue of his or her own presence the
very nature of the results (127). Scientific questioning is forced to explore the
unity of all thing (116-129). The universe is discovered to be dynamic, forever in
the process of changing (175-192). In an interplay of emptiness and form,
"material objects are not distinct entities" (195). Quark symmetries become a kind
of western koan (235-245). And ours is a universe in which even the detached
observer—the one attempting to be detached—discovers an inner experience of the
interpenetration of all thing (275-292).

Capra’s conclusion? The East need not take over the West, nor the West the
East: "Science does not need mysticism and mysticism does not need science, but
men and women need both. Mystical experience is necessary tounderstand the
deepest nature of thing, and science is necessary for modern life. What we need,
therefore, is not a synthesis but a dynamic interplay between mystical intuition and
scientific analysis" (297). Likewise in our own field of English education, we do not

need a synthesis of western research and eastern in-search. We need instead a

176
dynamic interplay of western and eastern insights on language and literacy. Men

and women need both.

Men and women need more than clever analysis, more than beautiful words.
Men and women need the truth which unifies the ten thousand thinguand a
rhetoric that will support their discoveries. In all this as usual Lao-tzu is a solid
inspiration, this time in the final chapter (#81) of the Inc IQ Ching—a chapter in
which "beautiful" could perhaps better be translated as "beautified" (Cleary 160);
knowers are not contenders, sages do not hoard or become prideful, men and
women everywhere seek the harmony with the world which is already theirs. In
such a place words are not to deceive or to decorate, not just for the sake of

experience, never weapons but always having violent energy:

True words are not beautiful,
beautiful words are not true.
The good are not argumentative,
the argumentative are not good.
Knowers do not generalize,
generalists do not know.

Sages do not accumulate anything
but give everything to others,
having more the more they give.
The Way of heaven

helps and does not harm.

The Way for humans

is to act without contention. (60)

Emerson, Rhetoric,
and the Quflpgtence of East and West

uctio

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is

fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word in

degrees. Our globe seen by God, is a transparent

law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the

facts and holds it fluid. Our culture is the

predominance of an idea which draws after it this

train of cities and institutions. (From the third

paragraph of Emerson’s "Circles")

For Ralph Waldo Emerson, human imagination is forever a work in progress.
If there is to be a metaphor for the creative potential, it is all around us. It is the
evolutionary principle by which, as for the Sufis and Zennists, God (or the God
within us) perpetually creates itself through our personal agency. It is everywhere
around us, and we are clothed in it. Its energy and power beat within our breasts.
If we are to accept a role for language itself in the unfolding evolutionary

creative process around and within us, Emerson is tentative in his conclusions
about that role. This is necessarily so-because if we are to regard rhetoric as a
science or as a branch of logic and philosophy in the western sense, that rhetoric
will in itself dam the flow. Rules, models, conventions, conformist expectations—all
create for Emerson the same dangers feared by the Sufi masters or by the
practicing Zen roshis: they divide our world into false categories and skeletal
patterns; they blind us to our own lived experience-not of classifications or of
persuasive certainties, but of W. Awareness requires its own

discourse.

177

178
Emerson’s own personal quest for just such a discourse did not unfold logically

or smoothly. Almost certainly he doubted the way. Yet it is just as certain that
Emerson was guided by his increasing knowledge of and respect for inspired
scriptures of the East. While much scholarship on American Transcendentalism
generally or on Ralph Waldo Emerson specifically either ignores or devalues the
role of eastern religions in Emerson’s development as philosopher or rhetor (see
Versluis 12-13), I agree with Arthur Versluis in his 1993 American
T d n ' an ian 1i '0 : "At the center of the entire American
Transcendentalist movement was the encounter with world religions" (13).

Likewise, in Lawrence Buell’s comprehensive bibliographic essay "The
Transcendentalist Movement” in W
W (edited by Joel Myerson, 1984), Buell assesses a central split among
the community of critics over the last one hundred years or more-between those
on the one band who see oriental influences as having little central importance to
the development of Transcendentalism and those on the other hand who argue
that Transcendentalism could not even have happened without orientalism (35).

In agreeing more with the latter view, I recognize myself among a distinct
minority. Lawrence Buell concludes, after an exhaustive study of research on
Emerson up to 1984, that 'Transcendcntalist interest in the orient has not been
studied exhaustively" (35).

Even a quick look at the entire Joel Myerson volume (The {Ifranscendenghs‘ ts:

A Rm'ew 9f me Rmch and ertim' m) certainly supports Buell’s conclusion. In
the entire thirty-page essay "Ralph Waldo Emerson" by Robert E. Burkholdcr and

179
J oel Myerson—a comprehensive bibliographic study of recurrent issues in criticism-
-fewer than ten items are listed regarding oriental sources (see page 148); among
those critical works that evaluate Emerson’s writing abilities or rhetorical habits,
few emphasize the importance of anything other than western traditions (see
pages 160-161).
In fact, Lawrence Buell lists only three major works involving "oriental

influences and analogues" and the entire body of Transcendentalist writing. The

 

and Frederic I. Carpenter’s W both appeared in the 1930’s. Carl

T. J ackson’s 1987 WWW containing only
one section on Emerson, at least asserts the key thought: "Unquestionably the first

Americans to approach Asian thought sympathetically and to assimilate Oriental
ideas into their world view" were the Transcendentalists (in Myerson 34). Quoting
Lawrence Buell again in the Myerson volume, the Jackson survey "is likely to
stand for some time as the standard reference work despite its relative brevity...by
virtue of its essential soundness and the dearth of scholarly interest in the subject"
(35).

This "dearth of scholarly interest" has been perpetuated, I think, by two likely
causes-causes which Emerson himself had to overcome in order to grow more
eastern in rhetorical practice himself: (a) W in the same way that
Emerson (like Thoreau) had to be exposed to the eastern texts themselves more
sympathetically before overcoming the prejudices of his intellectual culture; as

Arthur Versluis insists, by 1836, after more reading, Emerson began to "put aside

180
the popular prejudices against ’Indian superstition’ that he had read since college"
(54). (b) hitellm ghauvinism, in that critics—almost inevitably intellectuals
trained in the logic and rhetoric of western categories-naturally feel more at
home discussing aspects of Emerson’s life and work that are more comfortable to
them and demonstrable by them in normal methods: western influences, say, or
the relative discursive cohesion of a single work. It is eminently possible for
trained western critics to ignore the "new voice" that developed in Emerson after
the 1830’s, after his further reflection on eastern texts—especially since this is the
very voice addressed to the intellectual class, urging them on beyond their books
(V ersluis 57).

It is fortunate indeed that Arthur Versluis (1993) has so ably helped to rectify
what Buell called earlier the "dearth of scholarly interest." But before I show more
clearly why I celebrate what Versluis has done, there are two more matters to be
dealt with: how to define W and how to defend comparative
methods which may seem to traditional textual scholars less than scientific and
therefore incomplete.

Lawrence Buell has reminded us that those we call the "Transcendentalists"
share with each other more differences than similarities; they themselves boasted
that no two were alike (in Myerson 2). To find an encompassing similarity
necessitates generality and abstraction: one could say the Transcendentalists
shared a "faith in the boundless possibilities of human nature" (Buell in Myerson
2); but we say the very same thing about the English Romantics. To avoid the

confusion of all the best critics over the years about how to define

181

Transcendentalism, then, I will do what Arthur Versluis did in his 1993 volume; I
will adopt Lawrence Buell’s definition in his W but as
expressed by Versluis:

Transcendentalism is fundamentally an intuitionism, a belief that

Truth can be intuitively perceived by higher Reason that this

intuition precedes and invigorates all religious awareness, and that it

can penetrate the various forms of world religions, extracting from

them their essence. (V ersluis 12)
Note in this focus on Transcendentale as intuitionism a key timelessness. It is
true that intuition precedes Reason, but there is no sense in analyzing stages of
development, causes and efiects, or influences; it unifies various forms, it reveals
and illuminates, it assimilates. It relates to the Sufi’s mum and to the
Zennist—Emersonian "transparent eyeball." It vivifies Carl T. Jackson’s 1987
assertion that the transcendentalists sympathetically W "oriental ideas into
their world view" (in Myerson 34). W by something and t9
assinrilate something are opposite energies.

Well, isn’t it almost always the case that the way a person defines terms
determines the investigative method? Even Versluis somewhat apologizes about
his method in ways in which I hope not to have to; in a footnote, he writes:

Throughout I follow a practice of close reading bolstered by
intellectual history, and I note correspondences between
transcendentalist texts and their Asian referents. Occasionally-in the
section on Emerson and Thoreau—I note parallels between the
works of Transcendentalists and the Asian traditions, of which they
probably had little knowledge. But in doing this I am careful to note
that these are only parallels and am following a practice common in
contemporary scholarship on this topic. (Note 36, p. 15)

I agree that it will be much more important and enriching to look for parallels

182

than for influences. But, instead of saying "in doing this I am careful to note that
these are only parallels," I would say, "in doing this I am careful to note that these
are m parallels. Why? In characterizing the meaning for Ralph Waldo
Emerson of the expressions of the East with which he came into contact, I seek
not so much to explain as to imitate his own mm

For awhile, at least, revelation needs to gain precedence over what we
traditionally call scholarship-and for the same reasons it did for Emerson himself.
As Arthur Versluis asserts, Emerson was not often especially wncerned about
scholarship as such—whether a work he was reading was Islamic or not or which of
two literary works preceded the other; he just wished to determine whether a
passage he was studying or thinking of incorporating into his own writing might
excite appropriate insights (V ersluis 7). For Emerson, it was not a question of
finding nnngpij in eastern scriptures (V ersluis 63); rather, he meant to make
them here and now. Once again it is all assimilation: for Emerson, "The
significance of Asian religions—of all human history-consists of assimilation into
the present, into the individual here and now" (Versluis 63).

In fact, it is just such insights that make Versluis the best guide to anyone who
would look into the subject of Emerson and the East. For, even while doing
evident and well-informed scholarship, Versluis also begins with a gasp of the
Emersonian going beyond "contingent distinctions"; others may argue, in looking at
an Emersonian passage, whether the allusions are more Neoplatonic or Vedantic,
but I’m sure Emerson himself would remind us as Versluis does: "But finally,

Emerson was using the Neoplatonic tradition to transcend it—thc gods in question

183
are, ultimately, neither N eoplatonic nor Indian but just the gods, beyond such

contingent distinctions" (64).

Yet going beyond/beneath "contingent distinctions" did not come to Ralph
Waldo Emerson, as to a Zen or Sufi aspirant, in a single flash of insight. Most of
his work involved a thoroughly agonizing massaging of opposites. In Versluis’
words, "Emerson sought to resolve the tensions between tradition and inspiration,
between ritual and rapture" (51), and, I would add, between language and
expressionless resolution/revelation. To find a way to do so, Emerson must have
intuitively guessed, would take a lifetime of dedication, it would involve if
successful the "renascence" of religion (V crsluis 51) within his whole society, and it
would be achieved with tools not solely intellectual. This was and remains true
even as we struggle with overtly intellectual expression or symbols, drawn from our
look at intellectual history (as, in fact, I attempt to do here).

For Emerson, nnity was the highest aspiration—to join in one person and one
perception a reality between which joins the " ’men of talent,’ in whom the
’perccption of difference is predominant,’ with those who ’abide by the perception
of Identity,’ who are the ’Orientals, the philosophers, the men of faith and divinity,
the men of genius’" ("Plato" in Versluis 51). In this journey Emerson would draw
more and more freely from Asian religions in order to more and more perfectly
experience the one goal, the "self transcendence" (V ersluis 51).

Yet there is one more key action and power which is essential to this picture
in all the details that follow throughout this essay. Not only is there the urgency of

W the realization of what Versluis and others call the Transcendentalist

184
"literary religion" (51); even more vital is the simultaneous mm the
power of W that literary religion.

This last is the hardest and the most troublesome part of all, the power in
which Emerson so often felt he had failed-the power of action mm-

For Emerson—and for me in writing this essay—two key questions must with
great force come together: in assimilating and in transmuting and in the
accompanying rhetorical acts, the issue is not only the intellectual one of how to
achieve unity/revelation/awareness, but also beyond that these two key questions:

(I) in this very process, what becomes of the SELF?
(2) how is it that we talk about it?

To begin, we could find what Emerson wrote in his 193mg (May 1837) in a
passage which, according to Versluis, joins "Vedantic ideas with Germanic
mysticism” (55):

Who shall define to me an individual? I behold with awe and delight
many illustrations of the One Universal Mind. I see my being
embeddedinit.Iamonlyaformofhim.HeistheSoulofMe.I
can even with a mountainous aspiring say, M (1_M_N_ V: 336)

I remind you again, as I have in the beginning: awareness requires its own

discourse.

 

All this is precisely why Emerson mus; assert (in ”Circles”) that "there are no
fixtures in nature." Not a single aspect is finished. All is the M. Just as for the

Sufis or Zennists—or for Christian mystics looking at the world from God’s

185
perspective, or the Jesus within us—Emerson discredits any mere "mass of facts."

And again, just as for Sufis or Zennists, the core achievement of the
individual, in spiritual discipline, is to overcome cultural conditioning, Emerson
decries the crippling power of fixed ideas; he regrets the power over us of mere
facts: ”An expense of ends to meet is fate;-organization tyrannizing over
character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate; the
bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. So is the
scale of races, of temperaments" ("Fate" in Miller, ed. 982). All facts whose force
imprisons or limits us, including those which have to do with speech, naturally
block or blur the creative energy. For creation means change. And it is thus that a
whole society, if locked into its own picture of itself and only its own narrow range
of ways to express itself, can be imprisoned by a single idea. As above, ”Our
culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and
institutions." Or elsewhere, in "The American Scholar," Emerson asserts, "I had
better never see a book than to be warped by its attention clean out of my own
orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system" (in Miller, ed. 901).

"This train of cities and institutions”-these are the inevitable outcomes of our
willingness to accept a "mass of facts” as certainties. We may have become
trapped within the limits of our own discourse.

Intuitively understanding all the above but not necessarily knowing how to
teach thoroughly his listeners or readers what always to do about limitations,
Ralph Waldo Emerson did what his Sufi and Zen predecessors had done. He

taught a rhetoric of W a rhetoric of insight and of alternative

186

acceptable conclusions. He used and taught language as no more than a means to
an end.

I do not mean that Emerson learned from his Sufi and Zen predecessors-mot
inthesensethatyouwouldthinklmeantiflsaidso. Iwillseektoshowthe
vitality of these traditions as W by Emersonuand there is plenty of
evidenceubut to suggest that Emerson adopted Sufi or Zen ideas or practices
would be to contradict the whole point. Attentive readers may even have to
conclude that Emerson only partially understood his predecessors; but that would
not be a really significant point either. What E11 matter is to establish the validity
of a whole aspect of rhetoric short-changed by modern academic western
traditions, especially evolving into the modernism after the New Critics. This
potential for creative process within the study of rhetoric itself is m by Zen,
by Sufism, and by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

I keep referring to this potential (and avoiding to call it a tradition) as the
Macon—the "third eye" referred to in Zen, a place in which there is
discovered to be no split in our being after all; the "creative imagination" as
explored by Corbin in the works of Ibn ’Arabi; "poetry," "veracity," "truth," or
"action" in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson:

....Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want are instructors in
eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity
of action passed by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of
which the intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process
too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a
mulberry leaf is converted into satin. ("The American Scholar" in
Miller, ed. 903)

It is critical to repeat that this place of experience and expression which I call

187
the "place between" must be allowed a rhetorical possibility of its own. However
inadequate language might be, to the satisfaction of some, to define it and locate
it, without any rhetoric at all for this place few will think of it as real at all.

Before going on, then, let’s stop long enough just to review the place between
from the perspective of traditional academic rhetoric. Personal expression at the
one pole it is not. Only to express sensation or feeling creates the ygig for the
Sufis, the delusions for the Zennists, the W for Emerson; in
"The American Scholar" Emerson says, ”The world is his who can see through its
pretension" (in Miller, ed. 905). Mentation at the other pole it is also not. Logic,
reasoning, and persuasion create only false categories: Sufism, Zen, and Emerson
all agree about that—hence for all three the suspicion of the end value of words
and books (even as all three again and again create texts).

The intermediate realm, the rhetoric of probabilities, the place of sustained
and continuous flowing creativity, has to do wholly with neither logic nor
perception but with the transmutation of everything visible into symbols or
aphorisms. It is Sufism; it is the Tao; it is for Emerson the m.

Two key Emerson passages further vivify, from his perspective, the place
between. First from "Poetry and Imagination":

Mountains and oceans we think we understand;—
yes, so long as they are contented to be such,

and are safe with the geologist—but when they
are melted in the Promethean alembics and come

out men, and then, melted again, come out words,
without any abatement, but with an exaltation of

Power! (@mulctfllu’tiass 731)

Awareness, if you prefer to call it that, or primary creative power, requires not a

188
rhetoric of facts or categories or conventions of intellectual discourse, nor at the
other extreme mere depth of feeling: if awareness is to have any real rhetoric at
all, it will have to be one contemporaneous with the gods. In this sort of speech
there is no trope to fall back on unless you are yourself one: "For the value of the
trope is that the bearer is one: and indeed Nature itself is a vast trope, and all
particular natures are tropes" ("Poetry and Imagination" 731).

Note that a consequence of just such a "definition" of tropes is to nullify the
primacy of logic and persuasion. For the rhetoric we are discussing here is not
ultimately one for audiences at all; the purpose is not to affect listeners or hearers
but to validate the power of speakers or writers themselves.

A second defining Emersonian passage therefore comes from "The Oversoul":

Persons are supplementary to the primary teaching of the
soul....Persons themselves acquaint us with the impersonal. In all
conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made to a third
party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is
not social; it is impersonal; it is God. And so in groups where debate
is earnest, and especially on high questions, the company become
aware that the thought rises to an equal level in all bosoms, that all
have a spiritual property in what was said, as well as the sayer. They
all become wiser than they were. It arches over them like a temple,
this unity of thought, in which every heart beats with nobler sense of
power and duty, and thinks and acts with unusual solemnity....The
learned and studious of thought have no monopoly on wisdom. Their
violence of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly.
(In Miller, ed. 938-39)

Wholly planned and organized discourse-along with more discourse on planning
and organizing—"disqualifies [us] to think truly." Wholly unplanned and personal
discourse—mere self expression—cannot permit us to evolve beyond what we

already know, which is why Emerson asserts that "Persons are supplementary to

189

the primary teaching of the soul." It is once again a matter of the "third party," a
separate place between. But in this passage, "It [a greater place to which thought
arises among persons] arches over them like a temple." And it is, at least at first, a
temple made of words.

All of this helps to explain the apparent contradiction (contradiction from our
logical western point of view) between the deep suspicion of Zen, Sufism, and
Emerson for the value of language and books on the one hand and the necessary
engagement of all in rhetorical acts on the other. "It arches over them": among the
Sufis, recitation and prayer may be a gang activity; we know that Sufis read and
write many books and that they are elevated in their wisdom through controlled
linguistic interaction with periodically changing masters. Among those who practice
Zen, meditation happens on W in a shared silence, initiates present
themselves daily to their masters for brief discussions, Masters gauge initiates’
progress partly on the basis of verbal responses, and, once having attained
"enlightenment," even then m reading and writing may be continuous.

Likewise, for Ralph Waldo Emerson, books must be tools and discussion must
be transitory and evolutionary, but he too wrote prolifically. He must have
sincerely believed in the "third party," a metaphor for the place in language in
continuous creative remaking W a place "in which every heart beats
with nobler sense of power and duty." He wrote in "The American Scholar" that
books could make a man into a "mere thinker" (in Miller, ed, 899). Even more
importantly, just a few pages later, we read:

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading,-so it be sternly

190

subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued by his

instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can

read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other

men’s transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of

darkness come, as come they must—when the soul seeth not, when

the sun is his, and the stars withdraw their shining-we repair to the

lamps which were kindled by their ray to guide our steps to the East

again, where the dawn is. We hear that we may speak. The Arabian

proverb says, "A fig tree looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful."

(901)
Of ultimate value are the moments of seeing God directly, of participating in the
Creation at W of Zen awareness, spontaneous. But mm right
reading and writing can serveuif made contemporary, personal, actual, and
immediate—to guide us back to the Dawn again: "There are creative manners,
there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is,
indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind’s
own sense of good and fair" ("The American Scholar" in Miller, ed. 901). Other
people’s books and bibles might adjust us to the making of our own original ones
only very simply and serenely, only by virtue of the naked sky "which arches over
them like a temple," above the simple actions of the fig trees in the Arabic
proverb: "A fig tree looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful."

Emerson also wrote in "Poetry and Imagination"—and in other places,
necessarily—of the role of the rhetoric of probability in transmuting mere common
sense into the evolutionary and creative imagination. Common sense, he asserted,
looks at Nature and sees "real and final facts"; but the Imagination sees through
these facts and uses "them as tropes or words for thought which they signify." For

Emerson, the potential power of poetry meets people in their "pains, anxieties,

191
and superstitions" and, w "lifts the veil on universal laws" (in Complete

writings 732, 738)-

What becomes apparent, in all the above, are the following more than mere
facts:

(a) The writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson establish links, for western
readers, with the insights of the rhetoric of the East. This remains true whether
Emerson knew or intended to explore these links or not.

(b) The constellation of Emerson’s notions about rhetoric stands at
variance with some assumptions about rhetoric in modernist western traditions.

(c) Re—establishing our connection to this same constellation of notions for
us, in the West, would help us to deal with perceived deficits in our own
intellectual traditions.

(d) Clarifying the game of Emerson’s constellation of notions about
rhetoric for us and for our students would best serve us to understand Emerson
himselfaswellasthosewhohavebeen influencedbyhim.

(e) Keeping alive the Emersonian road of inquiry about rhetoric would
help modern researchers and teachers to accommodate our tradition with the
wisdom of the east while also rejuvenating our own inquiry and practice.

To illustrate these points, the following steps will have to be taken: The
Emersonian road of inquiry about rhetoric will have to be more clearly defined as
distinct from established modernist traditions; in this the work of Richard Poirier

can be our guide. This same road will have to be investigated for connections to

192

Sufi and Zen practices. Emerson’s rhetorical practice itself will have to be
described. And finally the teaching of Emerson in particular and rhetoric in
general will have to be redefined in the light of all we have learned. The

overarching metaphor remains the place between.

Emerson, Rheum Ed the Mgem' t Antithesis

Studying Emerson’s work from our post-modernist perspective as a path to
understanding the "place between" (the rhetoric of the creative and spiritual
imagination) produces two key side efi’ects. (l) Doing so helps us to know how we
can teach Emerson within the canon without making him seem like a
transcendental aberration to the "real" tradition of American writing. (2) Doing so
helps us to define the constellation of notions about rhetoric which places him
near the mainstream of an independent cross-cultural and trans-historical
tradition; in this tradition, of course, are Sufi and Zen rhetorics among others
from the east, as well as an atrophied-but-still-living branch of knowledge about
rhetoric in the west: a knowledge of the "place between," an intuition about what
the west in us needs to re-learn about the east in us all.

No work by a western critic more clarifies the atrophied-but-still-living branch
of knowledge about rhetoric than Richard Poirier’s 1111; Renewal of Literature:
Emersoman Reflections (1987). Poirier rightly sees Emerson as pivotal in our
rediscovery of a kind of rhetoric which at least admits a place for the "third eye,”
or for Emerson’s "third party."

From our modernist perspective, influenced by the New Critical attention to

193

the text itself, there are clear reasons, according to Poirier, why the trans-historical
aspects of Emerson’s rhetoric have been ignored or denied. Like Sufi or Zen ideas
and practices, the Emersonian tradition is ”antagonistic to any kind of
institutionalized discourse about literature or about ideas generally; it is
antagonistic to ’thinking’ as a profession..." Yet it is in academic institutions that
Emerson might get talked about, and talked about by people to whom Emerson
might seem anti-intellectual. He might seem anti-intellectual since the
"Emersonian idealization of action implicitly disparages the power of words" (50).
To focus on the limits of language in organized discourse is to talk those of us in
schools, it is thought, out of a profession.

And again all this brings us to the familiar irony-which now we must grasp
from the Emersonian perspective: how is it that Emerson (and James after him)
will talk to an audience even while attacking the value of talking? (50) If we are to
understand from Emerson that his emphasis on action (or being) presupposes
"that there are no verbal solutions" (48), is there any serious purpose for rhetoric
at all?

Emerson’s own answers to these questions, as Poirier interprets them, would
be greatly at variance with key assumptions about M held as holy by the New
Critics or by TS. Eliot, whom Poirier deems as the single-handed creator of the
rhetorical tradition we have inherited from the recent past (96-113). This is
because for Emerson, as for the Sufis or Zennists, it is not the text itself which
matters at all. In Poirier’s words, "The product of art is not the work you read or

look at" (84). The product is much more in the mediation between the maker of

194
words and the words themselves, the maker of the words and his or her own
active resistance to them. This is a far cry from TS. Eliot, for whom, according to
Poirier, writing was "more or less indistinguishable from a critical reading that was
all but crippling" (109).

Emerson worked in the other direction, toward a rhetorical stance in which,
far from being crippling, writing could temporarily free him to a power over
words.

Let’s see further how Poirier helps to explain this. It is, firstly, not at all the
case that Emerson felt no antagonism to literature or to the painful necessity of
language. As for all of us, it must have irritated Emerson greatly that he could not
prevent words from squirming out of his very grasp. The text itself is always on the
move. As Poirier puts it, "language represents both an entitlement to say certain
things and the evidence that we are never done trying to say other things" (138).
The text simultaneously moves with and against us; it cannot say what we mean;
what we mean is forever becoming unsettled.

Poirier quotes Emerson in "Prudence": "We write from aspiration and
antagonism, as well as experience." He takes Emerson to mean that

while we aspire to say something new, the materials at hand indicate
that whatever we say can be understood only if it is relatively
familiar. We therefore become antagonistic to conventions even
though we are in need of them. Indeed, the social and literary forms
tlmt ask for our compliance were themselves produced in resistance
to conventions of an earlier time. (138)

Not to use language at all would in a sense mean submitting to the power of

language over us. To develop a rhetoric of insight and creative resistance, on the

195

other hand, while never an act of victory, would at least keep us vibrantly alive-
alive in a rhetorical stance within the W (a) mere submission to
conventional categories (on the one hand) and (b) mere personal expression, the
unfamiliar to others (on the other hand).

Poirier may be right, in his concluding section of Wm
that Emerson’s dream of genius was to "know a world without knowing it as text"--
an ambition "utterly at odds with a poet’s calling" (210). But in lived experience,
for Emerson and for us, we must say ygé to life, a life in which language is
simultaneously the expression of and the obscuring of truth.

We must figure out what our am will be in this context.

You can see from this the sense in which for Emerson rhetoric m a rhetoric
of m. We are caught in the middle of everything by our own language-if we
see that language, trans-culturally and trans-h'utorically, as far more than text. Our
Wsmnwwithinmemivemeisimelfilflunhamnofmgmfly.
As Poirier indicates, Emerson "implies that language is both the gift of
consciousness and its exacting price, and because of it we live not in a natural but
in a conventional, and therefore artificial, relation to the world and to ourselves"
(96). A certain aspect of language both gets in our way and frees us from the past
into the creative future at the same time. Our resistance to convention is a heroic
resistance out of which can be created—temporarilyuour very own selves.

All of this also helps to explain in another way why Sufis, Zennists, and
Emerson disciples alike distrust language, especially published language; The text

itself does not matter. It is the process, of which the text is only the by-product,

196

that matters.

All of this additionally helps to explain why Poirier sees modernism, post Eliot,
as such a direct and successful challenge to the Emersonian "tradition," not dead
but latent. Poirier emphasizes, for modernists, the virtue of difficulty. And reading,
to be good and productive, must be difficult too. This very dificulty, according to
Poirier, has two results: it encourages a whole body of interpretive discourse
(which may be neither useful nor creative in itself); it "perpetuates the power of
literature as a privileged and exclusive form of discourse" (which turns writing into
a class issue, criticism into a "snob’s game") (98). Yet these facts may go on
unnoticed within the very institutions which perpetuate the primacy of modernism.

Such a modernism is text-choked; if looked at from the Emersonian
perspective, it is confusing the means with the ends; books themselves take the
place of nature. If looked at from the Zen perspective, it is the worst kind of
delusion, the focus on the public at the expense of the private, artificial categories
in place of the non-dual; the virtue of difficulty is precisely the opposite of Zen
spontaneity and simplicity. If looked at from the Sufi perspective, it is once again
the emphasis on the juridical aspect of the Word rather than the creative
imagination.

Poitier summarizes his definition of modernism by saying that "modernist
writers lend themselves to and encourage a programmed and widespread
misreading of a kind that calls attention mostly to structured complications and
designs of allusiveness" (104). Such misreading calls us, through the force of its

rhetorical assumptions, powerfully away from spontaneity, insight, creativity; it kills

197

effectively the place between.

If modernism is, in Poirier’s terms, a giant misreading of texts and rhetorical
acts, that same modernism is in direct contrast to the insights of eastern rhetoric
surveyed earlier. It is a modernism which expressly denies access to either Sufism
or Taoism or to any of their derivatives. And that very same modernism is at the
root of the perceived dualism in schools with which I introduced this series of
essays.

The deep divisions between modernist and Emersonian perceptions of
rhetorical acts explains, according to Poirier, why "Emersonians like to be at odds
with those whom William James calls ’intellectualists,’ people who prefer to think
of truth as something already waiting to be discovered, something with a capital
letter, not followed, as in Frost, by a question mark" (175). "Intellectualists" may
think of a text, appropriately dificult and patterned with allusions, as containing
the signs of its own elucidation-almost as though analysis and persuasion are the
real and final categories of human experience. Emersonians counter, Poirier would
say, that "language is a way of making things clear but also of insisting that things
are not and should not be so clear as to seriously restrain us" (29). This is because
the job of a fluctual rhetoric of personal insight—one that permits literature to
"change shape every twenty years or so" (Poirier 4)—is to make possible our
m triumph over convention, our triumph over language itself.

Or at least we can pretend—we can delude ourselves and others into believing-
-that originality in language is possible. It is very Zen of Emerson to first

recognize, as Poirier insists he does, the "conventions, usage, grammar, structure,

198

rhetoric" of the received past, and then still insist on the true job of originality: "to
make the above seem artificial" (36) even if we are dependent upon them.

As in Sufism and Zen, the job of a rhetorician exploring personal awareness is
neither to com the past nor to break with it utterly (since that would not be
possible anyway); the job, rather, is to mtg a temporary victory over what
Emerson named, please recall, "mere facts." The job of the Zen or Sufi in
Emersonian rhetoric is not to be useful at all.

The utilitarianism of western academic discourse assumes that literature is
good for people. Indeed Poirier begins his "Prologue" by reminding readers about
the "long history of demanding [or assigning] reading for cultural renovation" (4).
We hear that the West is in trouble in the "centers of the culture" (as in the
teaching of its literature or in the training in its rhetorics); but Poirier believes that
this is "merely one more journalistic-political maneuver designed to obscure the
failure in our political-economic-social arrangements" (8). We cannot solve these
problems by teaching texts.

But we c_a_g teach a more Emersonian rhetoric in which resistance (something
more like Friere’s "critical literacy") can teach us to see texts, if shrines of past
rhetorical solutions, as no more than they are. Shrines live only if we make them
so. We go to them before they come to us.

It is no wonder that the key danger that would concern Emersonian
rhetoricians would be to be entrapped by their own language. Fully in the Eastern
tradition, Poirier insists that "Emersonians want to prevent words from coming to

rest and want to dissuade us from hoping that they ever might" (16). Words are

199

not reality.

At this point Poirier quotes from "Circles": "Nothing is secure but life,
transition, and energizing spirit" (16). I would add, also from "Circles," several
aphoristic summaries: "New arts destroy the old" (Miller, ed. 946); "Good as is
discourse, silence is better" (948); "The field cannot be well seen from within the
field. The astronomer must have his diameter of the earth’s orbit as a base to find
the parallax of any star" (949). And "I unsettle all things" (951).

Much like a Zen or Sufi Master, Emerson is all energy, all g‘ mtience. He
defines genius as "impatience with the codifications of life" (Poirier 65). No
wonder he felt "on edge" (Poirier 9) about his own rhetorical stance.

No wonder as well that Emerson would have preferred to discuss rhetorical
acts rather than the expectations of rhetorical pm. No wonder one of
Emerson’s favorite words was power.

Poirier best explains the Emersonian tendency toward "active" rather than
"reflective" responses by quoting from Emerson’s inheritor, William James in
James’ m lecture 11:

A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once and
for all upon a lot of inveterate habits dear to
professional philosophers. He turns away from
abstractions and insufficiency, from verbal solutions,
from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles,
closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins.
He turns toward concreteness and adequacy, towards
facts, towards actions and towards power. (17)

James learned the elements of this manifesto from Emerson, but elements of this

manifesto in its rhetorical applications pre-date Emerson by centuries. It is as

200

though the Emersonian "tradition" which Prorier defines as distinct from
modernism, is a stream of insight into rhetorical acts that returns us to earliest
civilizations. A merely scholarly analysis might obscure such facts, but Emerson
too was aware of the trans-historical aspects of key human insights; Poirier
reminds us of an 1847 passage in Emerson’s Journal: "A good scholar will find
Aristophanes and Hafiz and Rabelais full of American history" (44). Similarly,
according to Poirier, the New World "offers an opportunity less to discover the old
than to rediscover its true origins otherwise obscured within the encrustations of
acquired culture" (45).

Yet taking such a global and trans-historical approach to cultural themes--
including the study of rhetoric—may be "disruptive of the critical-interpretive
enterprise as most people practice it" (Poirier 26).

To cast off the "encrustations of acquired culture" relates to the special kind of
stupidity recommended in Zen meditation and practice. It is, even within the study
of rhetoric itself, to be willing to see the independence of art from life, to see that
art is not necessary. Emerson wrote in his journal on May 18, 1840: "Criticism
must be transcendental, that is must consider literature ephemeral and easily
entertain the supposition of its entire disappearance" (in Poirier 27). We could
begin to understand in this way the legendary Zen poets who floated their
parchment poems down the rivers into the sea. They acted on the supposition that
thetextinitselfistrulyunnecessary.

Poirier asks the challenging question: WW
go? The answer, Poirier thinks, is in the metaphor of transition. If, as in "Self

201
Reliance," "power ceases in the instant of repose" (in Poirier 47), this only suggests
our fear, if we are not in Mn, of being insulated in our own minds (60).
Words, no matter what the rhetorical stance, are inadequate to convey how genius
m (or the Tao or Ibn ’Arabi’s creative imagination).

In this way there is great sense in Emerson’s famous admiration for
contradiction. To have seen Truth, to have achieved authority even for a moment
over language, is to have killed it-just as, in the Taoist legend the King died the
minute his guests had bored into his face the defining holes.

To be constantly tentative and questioning, at least in this life, is the only Way.
Yet we will do so m. Rhetoric is for Emerson both his most resisted fate
and his most revered freedom.

Emersonian language is an Emersonian fate because it is the most powerful
element of inherited culture: it binds us to the past and to convention. Emerson
"was ready to teach us," Poirier says, "long before Foucault, that if we intend ever
to resist our social and cultural fate, then we must first see it for what it is, and
that its form, ultimately, is the language we use in learning to know ourselves"
(72). Yet rhetorical stance is also the most potent place, for these very same
reasons, to resist our fate, to redefine traditions, to escape (if only partly) from
conditioning, to geat; who we are. As Poirier puts it, "Language is the only way
to get around the construction of language, and in his management of this paradox
Emerson shows why he is now and always essential (72).

All of this should help to define Emerson as our teacher of the 21W.

He learned how to be neither this nor that—like Wordsworth, according to Poirier,

202
"beside himself" (75)-unlike many of us, at home in a sort of suspended, noble
perplexity. In assenting to while also resisting rhetorical tradition and past writing,
Emerson developed the sort of detached self recommended by mystics of the
East-what Poirier calls a "loose-fitting“ self: "indifferent to social identification,
and capable of that ’doubleness’ which makes it possible to be inside and outside
society at once, inside and outside the self‘ (77). ,

Yet Emerson was no Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, not a double personality. In a
contradictory sense, he was the one man in between. Note the words of Emerson
himself in "Experience":

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well over

them. Under the oldest, mouldiest conventions, a man of native

force prospers just as well as the newest in the world, and that by

skill of handling and treatment. He can take hold anywhere. Life

itself is a mixture of power and form, and will not bear the least

excess of either.
The metaphor of skating emphasizes both m and mm as a source of true
power. For Emerson language is wholly, at its most real, utterly transitory and
vehicular.

What’s more, once you have skated across a pond, you can discard your
skates. Or at least you could consider erasing as you go: "The great poet makes us
feel our own wealth, and then we think the less of his compositions. His best
communication to our mind is to despise all he has done" ("Oversoul" in Poirier
68). Or, I would add, to despise all we ourselves have done.

Here we have come to the real core of the issue, and to the purpose of caring

whether we can have a rhetoric of inception at all. Here we need to see in what

203

seme Emerson’s rhetorical stance can be called a rhetorical stance.

What does it mean to discard the skates? Where will you be going? And what
do you have to say?

At the exact moment when the skates are thrown away, we have only weak
names. We call this non-dual timeless inception many things in the cross-cultural,
transhistorical stream of experience I have called between: enlightenment,
awareness, the Way of the Near; Emerson, in "The Oversoul," can only use the
name mimics

mm is an appropriate word for Emerson to use since it is borrowed
from his Christian tradition and its association with mysteries. It is a word his
audience would partly understand. But, as a word choice (naturally), it is
potentially misleading, inexact, too weak for its job. WI! cannot be defined
by Emerson himself except as "the announcements of the soul, its manifestations
of its own nature" ("Oversoul" in Miller, ed. 939).

But it can be described. "Announcements" and "manifestations" "are attended
by the emotion of the sublime" (939); they are "an influx of the Divine mind into
our mind" (939)-what Mircea Eliade would call, in his W
home, hierophanies (195).

Emerson is very careful to insist that such revelations are not thought about.
They merely occur. And they require a special language even to talk about them.

Not being thought about, revelations of course cannot be defined—only
described in such words as "thrill," "awe," "delight" ("The Oversoul" 940). As for

the Sufis or the Zennists, they are not mrceptions: that would be too dualistic,

204
connoting a giver of light versus a receiver of light. Nor are they Mentions—that
is, known or studied beforehand, related to what is already known, scheduled or
prepared for. They are better called inceptiogs, indicating that they are sudden,
unexplained, unexpected, impossible to analyze, and wholly difficult to talk about.

Emerson is also careful to insist that such "inceptions" are non-dual or, if
western rhetoric insists, unitary: "In these communications [that is, between person
and God or 3939;; person and the Tao], the power to see, is not separated from
the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience
proceeds from a joyful perception" (940); dualistic categories of beingness or cause
and effect have no role.

Whereas western talk about cause and efiect, the useful analysis of origins and
influences and consequences, creates a Logic which is everywhere embedded in
language—and which requires reasoned discourse-m refuses to link even
questions (a kind of causes) with answers (a kind of consequences). Emerson

asserts later in "The Oversoul":

These questions which we lust to ask about the future, are a
confession of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in words
can reply to a question of things. It is not in an arbitrary "decree of
God," but in the nature of man that a veil shuts down on the facts of
tomorrow: for the soul will not have us read any other cipher than
that of cause and effect. By this veil, which curtains events, it
instructs the children of men to live in today. The only mode of
obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses, is, to forego all
low curiosity, and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into
the secrets of nature, work and live, work and live, and all unawares
the advancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition,
and the question and answer are one. (In Miller, ed. 941)

Clearly a place or time in which "the question and answer are one" is not amicable

205

to a rhetoric of classification and analysis. For our best questions, "God has no
answer."

Yet for Emerson this does not mean there are no answers. Rhetoric will play
a role between persons and God if (a) you allow that there is ”no answer in
words"; and (b) at the same time, resisting both the absoluteness of "wise silence"
(936) and the volubility of too much artificially structured talk, you allow for there
to be language: "The only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the
senses, is,...work and live, work and live..." And, adding to that list, m in the
slow building of 3 "mm."

For that "new condition" there are temporary names: "a certain tendency to
insanity," "ravishment," "enthusiasm" (940)-what the Sufis called intgg'cation.
Emerson, like any good writer trained in tradition, gives a few examples: being
"basted with excess of light" (Thomas Gray), "the trances of Socrates, the ’union’
of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen,
the conversions of George Fox and his Quakers, the illumination of
Swedenborg,...the rapture of the Moravian and Quietist" (940), and so on.
Emerson defines what all of these have in common even while he knows they
resist definition: "Revelation is the discourse of the soul" (940).

How typical of Emerson to hazard a clear-seeming definition—and then to
contradict its very adequacy; he would like to go beyond words, but words are
what he has. First, after "defining" revelation as "the discourse of the soul," he
shows that most will understand by that prophecy, a kind of fortune-telling. People

still want specific and measurable answers about the future in specific and

manageable words.

But such specificity would be immediately untrue. It would let people rest:
they would "know" and then fail to search. That is just why Emerson first gives his
readers or listeners what they want—a definition, an answer—and then takes them
£18!

To those who would wish for measurable and specific answers to important
questions, Emerson says:

We must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An answer

in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions you ask.

Do not require a description of the countries to which you sail. The

description does not describe them to you, and tomorrow you arrive

there, and know them by inhabiting them. ("The Oversoul" in Miller,

ed. 940)
"Do not require a description of the countries to which you sail," Emerson advises
us. Yet we keep demanding descriptions all the while. And Emerson himself keeps

giving them just as he continues to take them away.

et ' d t tecede

Before summarizing the rhetorical facts of Emerson’sdiscourse as western
critics have chosen to analyze them, it is important to see how Emerson relates to
the East—especially to the Sufis and to the Hindu/Buddhist/Zen way of the Orient.
Then we can observe if what Emerson has in common with the east is similar to
what puts him at variance with the west (especially if by "west" we mean the

common sense tradition of rationalists such as Hugh Blair, leading to what Poirier

207
has called the "modernism" of our own century). Then finally such a study will

reveal what a study of "eastern" aspects of Emerson’s work still has to teach us as
we define or intuit our rhetorical and pedagogical strategies for our own time.

As early as 1953, in the Emerson Handbmk edited by Frederic Ives
Carpenter, Emerson’s apparent lack of formal logic, "his failure to follow the rules
of formal logic" (109), is placed in the context of Emersonian m. The key to
understanding Emersonian rhetoric is to focus on the distinction between "the
logic of human understanding" and transcendental "Reason" (1 10). For modern
scholarship, the institutions of the academy in particular, Carpenter and others
believed that writers would have to distinguish between "the discursive language of
science and logic" and the "presentational language of art, religion, and myth"
(110).

And I would add: writers would have to stop confusing the two or sanctifying
the one at the expense of the other.

In order to explore how a rhetoric in the western world, of use to actual
audiences, could be developed and perfected, Emerson turned to the East. But he
did so a bit at a time, not always knowing why. He is likely to have misinterpreted
the actual East in the process in order to suit his own needs, and he may have
made conclusions (about Sufis and Hindus in particular) that were based on
insufficient knowledge. We may even have to conclude that he insufficiently
understood the relationship of the East to him, in and of himself; he may have
failed in his own enterprise. However that may be,

In Emerson’s mind a "meeting" of East and West took place which

208
was of historic importance. Although he never succeeded in uniting

these opposites, he helped introduce the western mind to eastern
thought, he introduced and naturalized eastern thought for western
readers, and he partially assimilated it in his own writing and
thinking. Perhaps because Emerson attempted so immense a task,
his partial failure has seemed to outweigh the minor successes of
lesser men. (Carpenter 110-1 1)
Let us at least try to understand what drew Emerson to eastern texts, and what
aspects of eastern rhetoric he "assimilated."

That Emerson knew about Islamic and particularly Sufic texts is certain. Yet it
is at first somewhat troubling how negatively he wrote of the Muslim faith. On the
last page of his essay "Natural Religion," he refers to the character of the Prophet
Muhammad as being very bad, even though, he says, there are many fine Koranic
passages (in Gohdes, ed. 60). Or, early in his process of learning about Islamic
writings, as he had been encouraged by his aunt (Mary Moody Emerson) to read
them, he was attracted to Islam only as a sort of "fairy land" of exoticism: "Every
man has a fairy land just beyond the compass of his horizon....and it is very natural
that literature at large should look for some fanciful stories of mind which
surpassed example and probability" (Letters of BEE I 116-17, ed. Ralph L. Rusk
in Obeidat 1 13).

A simple way to establish influence is to see references in Emerson’s own
works. The poem "Days" begins:

Daughters of Time, the hyacinth days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes...
(In Miller, ed. 1018)
Yet the image of the Sufi dervishes here, only a passing image, conforms to the

Western stereotype of whirling ecstasies, insensate states of misguided spiritual

209
intoxication, "muffled and dumb." Emerson means only to amplify and decorate a
poem about the quick passing of time, mortality, with a reference to a world which
fascinates him, but also a world of which he cannot or would not really avail
himself.

More subtle and interesting, the Sufi influence in the poem "Bacchus" centers
on the Sufi metaphor of intoxication in a much more developed way. While
allusions in the poem are comprehensively Greek, there can be little question that
the idea of spiritual drunkenness has been derived from Sufi poets he has read,
especially Sa’adi of Shiraz (b. 1194) and Hafiz (b. 1320):

Bring me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape. (11. 1-2)

Give me the true,—

Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled
Among the silver hills of heaven

Draw everlasting dew;

Wine of wine,

Blood of the world,

Form of form, and mold of statues,

That I intoxicated,

And by the draught assimilated,

May float at pleasure through all natures;
The bird-language rightly spell,

And that which roses say as well...(ll. 14-26)

(In Miller, ed. 1011-12)
As for Sufis, drinking "the true" will aid in piercing the mysteries and, significantly,
ingraspingtheMIanguagelockedinrealthings.Yetevenso,theaspectof
this piercing of mysteries remains quite amorphous and idealized in the poem; the
poem reflects little actual understanding of the Sufi mystical Way. "Bacchus,"

210
though written in Emerson’s maturity (1846), reflects more what Murwan Obeidat
calls his "early phase" of orientalism, an "awareness of the Orient" which manifests
itself mostly as "fragments of fantasy that reflect Emerson’s preoccupation with
exoticism" (133-34).

Yet Obeidat shows conclusively in his 1988 article in 11;; Muslim World how
Emerson’s interest in and knowledge of the Muslim east began to grow. Certainly
"not an orientalist himself," Emerson nevertheless began to read all the Muslim
books he could find during the 1830’s and 1840’s (see Obeidat 134).

As Obeidat emphasizes, by 1850, when Emerson published his W
Meg, he referred frequently, often in passing, to Islamic materials even when
discussing matters unrelated. Especially telling, according to Obeidat, is the first
sentence in the essay on "Plato":

Among secular books, Plato only is entitled to Omar’s fanatical
compliment to the Koran, when he said, "Burn the h'braries; for their
value is in this book." (W IV 39 in Obeidat 134)
Why does Emerson reserve this unique place for Plato only? It is because,
according to Emerson, Plato synthesized "the unity of Asia, and the detail of

Europe" (Works IV 53), the soul of the east and the rational science of the west.

 

Yet throughout "Plato," there is no doubt that Plato subserves the east to the
west. Like Whitman after him, he imagines human culture moving from the east
to the west, from the fatality and immense soul of the east to the active,
intellectual, manipulative science of the west. While the two poles are unequal, as
Emerson sees them, neither can be fully understood without the other. As Obeidat

so aptly says, "East and West are intellectually defined here. The difference

211

between them is neither geographical, nor racial. It is a difference in the cultures
that distinguish the two worlds" (135). And for Emerson other names for east
versus west are "the one and the many," or "being and intell " (135). This is the
very split which Emerson knew intuitively he would seek, through language, to
overcome.

It is as though, I too am suggesting, if the historical sweep of civilization has
been from east to west, continuing westward it would arrive at the east again.

As Emerson matured, Obeidat suggests in his article, his attraction to Sufic
texts intensified as he saw in them potential solutions for some of his own
problems. While Emerson still saw "America’s preeminence in world history"
(Obeidat 136), he also felt less and less negative bias toward the Muslim world,
especially in terms of the poems of Sa’adi and Hafiz: witness Emerson’s essay
"Persian Poetry" (136). In spite of all the praise of Plato as unifier of west and
east, Emerson still saw something lacking in Plato, something still missing, he may
have thought, in western letters: "It is almost the whole deduction in merit from
Plato, that his writings have not,—-what is no doubt incident to the regnancy of
intellect in his work,-the vital authority which the screams of prophets and the
sermons of unlettered Arabs and Jesus possess" (m IV 76 in Obeidat 136).

Obeidat goes on to convince that it is just this element of vital authority
Emerson sought and found in the Sufi poems of the Persian poets. Emerson may
have felt that "being occidental is being better" (Obeidat 136): "Orientalism is
Fatalism, resignation: Accidentalism is Freedom and Will" (M X 90). But he

also thought that being occidental is being incomplete.

212
Of course it is worth noting that generalizing about orientalism as fatalism is a

skewed misreading or misunderstanding of true facts; but remember we are not
speaking here of a real East or certainly of a real orientalism or even a deep
understanding of Islam. As Obeidat too remarks, "Emerson imbued his writing
with Islamic quotations, or brief, incidentally confused, references to Islamic
metaphysics and made these subservient to his views" (137).

There is nothing wrong with having done so. Some. will argue that is what I
have done. There is something wrong with "making these subservient to his [our]
views only if we are making greater claims for them: that they embody the real
east or an organized scholarly treatment of the east. In the sense that Emerson
was working, there is no real east at all except what he makes it represent m.

m it can come to represent partly a tentative resolution to his questions
about Egg and partly a way to deal with his instincts about W.

If Fate is a characteristic of (Emerson’s concepts of) orientalism, his essay on
"Power," according to Obeidat, enhances his grasp of what such fatalism must
mean to him. "Power" "develops the idea of freedom overagainst surrender to
fate" (Obeidat 138). I think myself this is best understood in the essay on "Fate"
itself (1851). Here Emerson seems to dim the "fatalists" of the east when he
quotes from a Persian poem in the opening pages. It is not a question of whether
or not people are subject to limiting powers; in this essay Emerson is forced too to
say that they are. It is rather a question of with what bravery and fortitude people
respond to the facts and exercise their freedom within boundaries: "Great men,

great nations, have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of

213
life, and have manned themselves to face it" (in Miller, ed. 980-981).

Furthermore, to deal with his instincts about mal' authority, Emerson did what
the Sufi poets did. He crafted words. He asserted his instincts in images. He
created, even out of his own limitations and the limitations of language, new
metaphors or aphorisms. For example, Emerson wrote aphoristically, "’Tis the best
use of Fate to teach a fatal courage" ("Fate" in Miller, ed. 987). And later in the
same essay Emerson recreated once again his image of the skater skimming freely
between: "the cold is inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood, freezes a man
like a dewdrop. But learn to skate and the ice will give you a graceful, sweet, and
poetic motion" (Miller, ed. 990).

How can we m if Emerson speaks here truly? We would have to try this
skating ourselves. Or at least we need to accept the truth of these words because
Emerson says so.

The power of the language, if even temporary, to suspend all disbelief is what
I think Obeidat thinks Emerson means by W. What Emerson most
admired in the Sufi poets he knew, according to Obeidat, was their 1111911221181
firm their playful and necessarily inconsistent attitudes about life, the "mental
force" they acquired from freedom which exists in spite of limitations (139).

I believe that it is a similar joyful recklessness about language, even while
aware of its serious limitations, that Emerson let the Sufi poets rub off on him.
Writing of Hafiz, Emerson says, "Hafiz praises wine, maidens, boys, birds,
mornings, and music, to give vent to his immense hilarity and sympathy with every

form of beauty and joy....Those are the natural topics and language of his wit and

214
perception" (in Obeidat 140).

Please note in this passage how £91215 and language come together in the
same breath. For the perceptions and ideas cannot float off lonely by themselves;
organized words are a hollow fate in themselves if they have no wit to animate
them, no reckless freedom of spirit. As Obeidat puts it, Emerson, like Hafiz
"believed that the force of men’s thoughts lies in the way of uttering them" (140).
No wonder Emerson quoted Hafiz this way: "Loose the knots of the heart" (M
VIII 246 in Obeidat 140). That is the core of the Sufi message.

The Sufi poets reinforced for Emerson many of his chief instincts. In living
freely a dignified life within the constraints of recognized fate, the Sufi poets
embodied what Emerson called xii-Lem (Obeidat 141). likewise, knowledge is
of much less use than energy or "vent"; as Obeidat summarizes it, "Self
expression...is an utterance of every self reliant man who could use nature as his
language" (141). Writing on Hafiz in his journals, Emerson asserts about
mm (which gives "vital authority") that it

is all we want: not knowledge, but vent: we know enough; but have
not leaves and lungs enough for a healthy perspiration and growth.
(M in Obeidat 141)

Finally, what the Sufi poets taught Emerson was the essential aspect of being,
in Obeidat’s words, "inspired men of their people" (142). I take this to be, for
Emerson, the ultimate source of their vitg authgg'ty: they "spoke" for their people
to focus all on the beautiful and the divine. This $11M in them, the audience,
which gave to their poems the ring of truth—if not the Truth itself. To find the

W of such an echo or ring brought Emerson to the East in the

215
first place, I believe—not to adopt the East as his home, but (in Obeidat’s words)
"to find a vocabulary for his [own, western] ideas" (145).

Emerson leaves no doubt about what is to him the centrality of rhetoric or the
ultimate power of speech; I cannot help but add, also from "Persian Poetry," the
following:

Hafiz was the Prince of Persian poets. His was the fluent mind in

which every thought and feeling came readily to his lips. The
difference is not so much the quality of men’s thoughts as in the

power of uttering them. (W 799)

Utterance most matters. It is the source of a true but unclear-to-the-mind sort of
mm!!-

To confirm in him such instincts about My, such free and reckless
utterance, Emerson (or anyone else) would have to turn further to the east. That
is, into silence.

Why this is so has already been clarified somewhat in the previous chapter.
Language is forever inadequate to express the Truth, Oneness (the non-dual), The
Tao, or God. Yet language is what we have as a tool to explore this nothingness-
the very same nothingness which the Zen masters would insist on calling All.

While Emerson did refer to the Orient often and while he read what he could,
I doubt that he ever really conceptualized aspects of the Tao exactly as we have
discussed them. Nor do I have any reason to believe that he had ever learned of
Toism. But he did admire the Hindus.

For example, his poem "Hamatreya," concerning the impermanence of land

ownership or pride in all possessions, has an obvious Hindu source. Emerson

216

copied a passage from a sacred Hindu text into his journal in 1845 related
theoretically to this poem (See footnotes to the poem in Miller, ed. 1006).
"Brahma," a better known poem, at least represents a basic knowledge of Hindu
mythology, including the seven highest saints of Hinduism (See "Brahma" in Miller,
ed. 1019).

Yet I never feel quite the same vital necessity when Emerson refers to
Hinduism as I feel when he expresses his passion for Sa’adi of Shiraz. What then
is the role of the Far East in Emerson’s development, especially in terms of his
rhetorical ideas and practices?

First it could be said that Emerson may have in part acquired a certain
timeless or spaceless mm from the Hindu influence, though ideas about
sublimity in the western tradition of, say, Edmund Burke, might have done the
same. But secondly, and far more important, Emerson was remarkably Zen in
both thought and practice-even if, or largely because, he did not know it.

To see how the "long view" of Hinduism affected Emersonuits allowance for
the vastness of time and space—there are many places to look. One of the most
telling, to me, is in "Poetry and Imagination":

The belief that the higher use of the material world is to furnish us
types or pictures to express the thoughts of the mind, is carried to its
logical extreme by the Hindoos, who, following Buddha, have made
it the central doctrine of their religion that what we call Nature, the
external world, has no real existence-is only phenomenal. Youth,
age, property, condition, events, persons—self, even,-are successive
mains (deceptions), through which Vishnu mocks or instructs the

soul. I think Hindoo books the best gymnastics for the mind...All
European h‘braries might almost be read without the swing of this

gigantic arm being suspended. (W 730-31)

217
Several important features of this passage call attention to themselves. (a)

Emerson is impressed by the W aspect of Hindu religion and may have
been challenged in his own way, as we shall see, to deal with the philosophically
troubling aspects of the inner versus the outer life. (b) It is m appearances,
deceptions, that Vishnu m the soul. If there were no tensions between inner
and outer, the unspeakable and the spoken, the implication is that there could be
no instruction. (c) The $229 of Hindu precepts of time and space are so vast that
only one swing of the "gigantic arm" would more than account for a whole western
h’brary (or more). (d) Most important, Emerson includes in his list of deceptions
glam-"self, even"-a central clue to the meaning of the distant east to his own
meta-philosophical development.

To me it seems that Emerson has incredibly Zen moments. Yet there is very
little western literature which directly connects Emerson to the East beyond the
Sufis or the Hindus. That in itself isn’t so bad; it merely tends to disprove the
likelihood of a pattern of influence in the western sense. Yet if Emerson’s
constellation of notions about the east relates to a timeless and cross-cultural
aspect of human intelligence about spirit and language, as I believe, a pattern of
cause and effect would be immaterial anyway.

At least there is one article to go on, and it is so complete that it negates the
need for others. Soiku Shigematsu, in "Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Zen
Universalism," clarifies exactly what is most Zen about the western
transcendentalist.

Central, of course, are Emerson’s questions about the self ("self, even"). It is

218

ntt_er_u Zen of Emerson to doubt that intellect and self have even an important
relationship.

Shigematsu begins his analysis by restating, in his own way, the usual Zen
concept, derived as we have seen from Lao-tzu himself, of the centripetal versus
centrifugal minds. The centripetal mind turns inward, and its central question is
"Who am I?" The centrifugal mind, well-developed in the west, turns outward, and
its central question is "What is the universe?" (95).

Conceptualized this way, in western language, the issues remain hopelessly
dualistic.

This is why Emerson says, according to Shigematsu, that "science must be
studied humanly" (M V 169 in Shigematsu 95). Our centrifugal force must be
"not only intellectual but egoless," in which case the question "What is the
universe?" will become "’What is the relationship between the universe and
ourselves?” (95).

In this place, the place between, is the nexus of the Emersonian self, I think. If
the two questions become one guestinn (not in a dualistic but in an eastern non-
dual way), that question becomes a question about the nelf. That is why, I think,
Shigematsu quotes Emerson’s early journals: "The geat business of life is to learn
M" (M III 144 in Shigematsu 95). Quoting again from Emerson,
Shigematsu reminds us that "wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole
subject we study and learn" (M IV 67-68 in Shigematsu 96). Shigematsu knows
that this is the essence of Zen as he quotes Eihei Dogen (1200-53): "To learn the

Buddhist way is to learn oneself" (96).

219

To continue to read Shigematsu’s reading of Emerson is to read about Zen.
Having come to know the lives of all kinds of "religious enthusiasts" (96) in his
reading, Emerson makes perfectly clear in his diaries what Men all these studies:

EachowesalltothediscoverythatGodmustbesoughtwithin, not

without. This is the discovery of Jesus. Each perceives the

worthlessness of all instruction, and the infinity of wisdom that issues

from meditation. Each perceives the nullity of all conditions but one,

innocence; and the absolute submission which attends it. (M V 5

in Shigematsu 96)
No doubt Shigematsu is right to see in this very insight the meaning of the famous
WmehflnflgflamnoflnngeeaWQQcmfldbein
itself a Zen poem. Further, I would add, this very focus on self explains anyone’s
attitudes, if they are tentative, to organized instruction—especially in books. This
very focus puts into perspective our attitudes about books and therefore the utility
or uselessness of language. And this very focus explains to Christians everywhere
both the root of their own gnostic tradition and the root of Islam’s meaning as
Mgr; especially the Sufis or the Sufi in us concentrates on "the absolute
submission which attends [the nullity of all conditions but one)" (96).

This very "Zen Universalism" relates to Emerson’s instinctive attraction to the
long view which we have seen he knew mostly from ancient Hindu texts. From the
long view, distinctions disappear. Logical clarifications completely lose their
significance, Shigematsu insists (97), and this would have made Emerson less
bemoan "his own lack of logical ability"; in fact, if Emerson had only been able to
learn of Zen thought and practice, "he could have constructed and expressed his

thought much more consistently" (96-97). From the long view all difi‘erences

220

vanish, as it were when viewed from outer space. Shigematsu perfectly quotes
Emerson himself:

Every violation, every suicide, every miracle, every willfulness

however large it may show near to us, melts quickly into the All, and

at a distance is not seen. The outline is as smooth as the curve of

the moon. (In M V 164)
Most remarkable to me in this passage is Emerson’s use of the term The Q. It
could equally be called fining.

The All is equally the Nothing, which defies western logic. Shigematsu’s own

metaphor is precise:

This nothing, containing everything limitlessly, is in a perfect state of

stillness just before everything appears. It is, as it were, a top

spinning at full speed, which seems as if motionless. (99)
Emerson himself sought ways to express just such an effort to empty himself of
conventions, preconceptions, and cultural conditioning-using rhetorical techniques,
as we shall see, far more at home in the East than in the West. Shigematsi cites
one excellent example:

In the instant ]I] leave behind all human relations,...I become a

moist cold element...l have died out of the human world and come
to feel a strange cold, aqueous, terraqueous, aerial, etherial

sympathy and existence. (In M V 496-97)

In an efiort to m such insights, Emerson was more Zen than he ever knew,
understanding not from reading or research but from his own insearching how
self-negation is in fact the "perfect" self affirmation (Shigematsu 100). An
awakened one once said, "That morning star is myself! I am shining!" (100). This is
exactly what Emerson learned from his transparent eyeball experience, I think, or

when, as Shigematsu insists, he wrote "I feel the centipede in me-cayman, carp,

221
eagle, and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies" (in [MN IV 199-200).
The 3mg when the centripetal and centrifugal forces meet is the glf; the
Eng; when these forces meet is, of course, the place between:
Science was false in being unpoetical. It assumed to explain a reptile

or a mollusk, and isolated it,-which is hunting for life in gaveyards.
Reptile or mollusk or man or angel only exists in system, in relation.

(Poetry and Imagination" in W 729)
Or Emerson would say that most people have second-hand thoughts. But others
"will prefer the gandeur of that law which he finds in himself’ ("Natural Religion"

in Gohdes, ed. 55).

and torn 'eth

What it means for the theory of rhetoric among western researchers for a
person to "prefer the gandeur of that law which he finds in himself’ has produced
a rich literature. In the context of this study, parallels with perceptions of rhetoric
in the metaphorical cast are striking. A summary of these parallels will reveal
what is most eastern about Emerson’s rhetorical practices.

In Emerson’s early development, according to Sheldon W. Iieberman,
Emerson needed to find his own way to react against the neoclassical traditions he
had inherited from his own education. There having been no real revolt in
America against literary neoclassicism, Emerson remained basically unaffected by
European romanticism until the 1820’s. His main literary influence was still Hugh
Blair (Lieberman 22-25). Blair and the others associated with Scottish Common

Sense Realism believed that the best arbiter of literary works is public taste; critics

222

must defend that taste. The central tenet of Scottish criticism—"The careful
balance between passion and restraint, the emphasis on ’pleasing’ as the means
and on moral instruction as the objective of literature" (3l)-are the ideas against
which Emerson had to react in his development as a philosopher and rhetorician.

In a later article the same Lieberman shows clearly the shape Emerson’s
reactions against his own neoclassical education would take. According to
Lieberman, the years 1821-1836 mark dramatic changes in Emerson’s philosophy
and his rhetorical theory—a group of changes which separated him from the
influence of the Scottish philosophers of the eighteenth century.

Emerson encountered Blair’s lectures, according to Lieberman, as early as
1818 at Harvard. One early influence was Blair’s emphasis on models, distinctly
different from Emerson’s later work on invention. By 1828 things had changed, as
testified in his journal: "An alehouse is a better school for eloquence than a
college" (193). Emerson began to consider more and more the strength and value
of common speech. Also Emerson developed strong ideas on spontaneity (195).

For years to come, Lieberman shows, Emerson would try to bring into
ageeable relationship his increasing respect for economy, his belief in indirection
or surprising an audience into apprehension of a truth, and unity of discourse. He
wished to reflect in his own writing the organic integity he saw in the universe
without, he felt, exactly knowing how to do so. The problem of form remained
central for Emerson (200-06).

Here the conclusions reached by Emerson which are most related to the East

are vital. Among these is the pm of langnngn M E over form. Believing in

223
that caused Emerson to shape individual sentences that would startle and amaze

readers/listeners into their own Mgr-almost like koans. Similarly, Lieberman
believes, Emerson never solved his own perceived problems regarding ann (204—
06). That is because to have done so would have meant the end to Emerson’s
transition and power in the here and now, the place between satisfaction with
form and concept and resistance to language itself.

Seeing Emerson this way explains much about his own key decisions in life: his
attraction to Unitarianism and his life as a minister and then his rejection of that
role as a minister. LL. Buell, for example, places Emerson’s ideas of the poet-
priest (unifying art and religion) and Emerson’s ideas on expression or eloquence
in their Unitarian tradition. As Buell asserts, "A practical eloquence was what the
Unitarians sought in their preaching, not doctrinal logic chopping" (7). Buell
reminds us that Emerson called Locke and Hume "reasoning machines" (6). While
Emerson went further than Unitarian pulpit eloquence would allow, it remains a
fact that Unitarian distrust of creeds "made it more important for the Unitarian
minister to arouse the spirit than to instruct" (9).

Buell reminds us that Emersonian self-reliance demands creativity (15 ), not
imitation—making the ministers of established religion rank lower than artists to
an exceptional degee. Art provided Emerson, as a rhetorician, more freedom
than the ministry. Emerson’s literary objective, according to Buell, was to unite
"seer" and "sayer," "spiritual substance and beautiful expression...The ambivalence
is reflected in the image of the poet-priest in ’The Divinity School Address’ and

pervades all of Emerson’s literary criticism. Like the ideal preacher, Emerson’s

224
’Poet,’ the ’Man of Beauty,’ must be the ’reconciler,’ perfect in both impiration
and utterance" (19).
This role of reconciler helps to define Emerson’s relationship to me nlnce
m as found, independently, in Sufism and Zen. This is because Emerson’s
whole power and energy as rhetor proved to become one of active and perpetual

m between extremes.

For example, James A. Berlin, in his Wrimg' won in NE eteentn
annny @erican Coflegns, shows how those who inveigh against the lack of logic

in the essays of Emerson overlook the writer’s rhetorical intention. Rather than
studying his essays for the writer’s incapacities, taking account of Emerson’s own
reasons for writing his essays the way he did and focusing on the m of the
writer’s decisions will permit a new vision of the writer. To that end Berlin argues
for a view of romantic rhetoric as more than mere self-expression. Emerson dig
havespurposewithrespecttohisaudienceandasweshallsee,astrategywith
respect to them; mm purposewasnottoteachinthe normal sense ofmalring
demonstrable assertions. He wanted his listeners/readers not to learn but to seek
and to find.

Indeed the key to the theory of romantic rhetoric is in the theory of knowing.
Again it is Berlin who points out that romantic rhetoric "places the composing
process, the act of writing and speaking, at the center of knowing" (10). Yet this
means something very different to Emerson than it might seem; n1; conclusion is
that one cannot use just the language itself to tell another what one has learned--

thelearningisinmakingthelanguage.AsEmersonsaysinthe1867essayon

225
"Eloquence." "The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but one who is

inwardly drunk with a certain belief."

Berlin also shows that if learning/knowing consists of an action m '
perceiver and world, this epistemology goes beyond the prevailing empiricism of
the nineteenth century’s focus on the inductive method. While knowledge was to
the Common Sense Realists "extralinguistic" (21), and rhetoric "an elaboration of
how the mind of an auditor can be afiected so as to produce the immediate
experience of the interlocutor (21), knowledge became to the romantic rhetor a
way beyond the merely physical world and beyond the realm of demonstrable
proofs; knowledge is possible insofar as language permits us to transcend language
(11), and "the meaning is the metaphor" (11) in a method which is thoroughly
analogical. As Emerson himself said in Nntngn, the world is M.

Berlin puts Emerson in perspective when he summarizes: "Emerson departs
from (both Platonic idealism and Common Sense Realism) when he locates the
real in the fusion of the sensual and the ideal. Reality is a human construction,
joining the world of ideas to the material object in an act of creative perception.
The sensory realm by itself is lifeless matter. The ideal by itself is meaningless
abstraction. Knowledge is possible only in the interaction of the two" (46). In this
epistemology, any demonstrable proofs too easily become dogmauand dogma,
above all else, impedes personal knowing. In Emerson’s world, you simply cannot
tell anyone else what is real or demonstrate the absolute truth of anything. All is
analogy, emblem, and nntinn.

In the absence of adaptive forms and dependable m then, just what an;

226
the rhetorical tools that make writing an acceptable or meaningful cnoice to

Emerson, or to the Sufis or Zennists? The answer to be found in Emerson’s
attraction to eastern universalism is an emphasis-some would say, an
exaggeration—of invention and W3 metaphors, proverbs, aphorisms.

This is in a sense what R.A. Yoder concluded some years ago in an article on
"Emerson’s Dialectic." According to Yoder, a key Emersonian method, as
exemplified in "The Oversoul," is "wave after wave of assertion" with "geat
cumulative force" (316). Similarly, I would add, Emerson’s essay on My;
accumulates power through focus on memorable aphorisms: "A man is a god in
ruins"; "Man is the dwarf of himself'; "Man applies to nature but half his force";
"Deep calls unto deep."

R.C. La Rosa best formulates the significance of this perpetual invention of
aphorisms and proverbs in regarding them, in themselves, in important ways: (a)
as the powerful energy to forestall, if even temporarily, our tendency to be
satisfied with received forms, with mere imitation; and (b) as form in themselves:
aphorisms can have a purpose of their own in suggesting the shape of an entire
essay or lecture (20-30). Emerson called imitation "the vice of overcivilized
communities" (15) and emphasized again, especially for the maker of discourse,
the absolutely key role of invention and discovery.

Increasingly Emerson realized that a purposive technique of nLojd_ing
m means, in language, a focus on metaphor, analogy, proverbs, and
affirmation. The fact is, as Roland Lee points out (among others), Emerson felt

that belief is far more than adherence to doctrine and that faith is a kind of

227
knowing in its own right; perception of truth (or the desire for perception of truth)
can be aroused in others only 111m "proofs are impossible, unnecessary, and,
even worse, irrelevant" (235). As for indirection, two techniques were deliberate,
according to Lee: avoidance of a constant terminology (a glen of terms best
suggests an "unsayable reality"), and consistent afi'irmation (the better to train the
spirit). Emerson unified his essays not by idea but by attitude (242-44).

B. Packer similarly asserts that Emerson praised the "merit of not explaining,"
reflecting his skepticism about "the possibility of ’accurate’ expression" (322). This
is more than an assertion of a "necessary obliquity," as relevant journal passages
show": "Ihe aim of the author is not to tell truth—that he cannot do-but to
suggest it" (323).

One test case is the famous image of the "transparent eyeball," usually
considered bathetic, but Packer believes that even this was a calculated risk, a
"deh‘berate anti-sublime" (328). Here and elsewhere, she says, "Emerson
deh'berately invites us to consider him a fool" (328). Emerson’s rhetorical purpose
is not to gain admirers but to shock readers or listeners into finding their own
truth. Packer’s summary is that "Emerson never apologizes and never explains.
Challenge him and he simply withdraws, like Uriel, into his cloud, leaving it to his
readers to decide whether his apparent ’lapses’ are a result of his incapacities or
ours" (342).

But it is perhaps an article by Wayne C. Anderson which best puts Emerson’s
rhetorical decisions into focus and into historical context—and into relationship

with the independent practices of Sufi or Zen aspirants. Anderson centers his

228
work on what he calls Emerson’s rhetoric of reiteration. By rhetoric of reiteration
Anderson means the declaring of important beliefs followed not by proofs but by
repetition in other forms of similar declarations. While this strategy is not well
accepted in our own age of logical demonstrations and clear development of ideas,
there is a long tradition of declaration as a rhetorical strategy (37-38).

Emerson relies on the rhetoric of reiteration because his ideas are based on
"indemonstrable premises of faith." While Emerson is capable of clear reasoning
(and Anderson shows examples), he cannot employ these methods at "the most
important junctures in his prose" (39). At those junctures he must declaim and
reiterate to excite his readers or listeners to understanding.

By way of example, in Nam, Emerson asserts that "Nothing divine dies,"
while making no effort to validate the assertion. He can only repeat in other ways:
"All good is eternally reproductive" (39). Anderson argues for the effectiveness of
such a rhetorical method by referring to Perelman ("Ihe very fact of selecting
certain elements and presenting them to the audience" implies "their importance
and pertinency to the discussion") and to Piaget’s demonstration of presence (one
feature emphasized at a time in perception) (40-41).

Furthermore, Anderson shows the connection of the techniques of declaration
and reiteration to the idea of "refining" in the W in which
no opportunity is given to the hearer "to remove his attention from the topic":

Refining consists in dwelling on the same topic and yet seeming to
say something very new. It is accomplished in two ways: by merely
repeating the same idea, or by descanting upon it. We shall not

repeat the same thing preciselyufor that, to be sure, would weary
the reader and not refine the idea-but with changes. (41)

229
Anderson further traces the tradition of repetition through Cicero and Quintillion

to the Renaissance and finally Blair. Repetition gets attention and attention
prepares for belief (42). Of course the problem of belief remains, as Emerson well
knew. But conversion itself "takes place beyond the realm that language can
control" (48).

The rhetorical tradition argues that repetition itself can be persuasive. And at
stake is the relationship between rhetoric and logic. Insofar as Emerson’s essays
are persuasive, they establish "the peculiar power of rhetoric that does not depend
on argument" (49). The power of rhetoric may not depend on argument at all.

A key insight for readers of Emerson must then be that Emerson was not
trying to convey results and certainly did not intend to create a philosophical
system. To look for such as system is to totally miss what Emerson is all about
(Lee 239). As Roland Iee puts it, interpreting here, Emerson followed the
principle that "one can never stir a reader into movement by inviting him to stand
still" (23940). As Emerson said in his 1835 Journal, "To think is to act."

Yet this leaves us where we already were, wondering about the rhetor’s
relationship to nunljence. Many, including John Sloan, have argued that Emerson’s
own rhetorical principles lead to the conclusion that adaptation to an audience is
unnecessary. Conciliating an audience means, after all, that you may fail to "edify
them" (11). Indeed proofs are unnecessary for one who is able to take "sovereigi
possession of an audience" C'Eloquence," 1847).

Emerson even sometimes asserted that one should jgnngg audience response

since responding to criticism, either positive or negative, "spoils later efforts"

230
(Sloan 1 1). The only proper position to take in regards to an audience is that the
audience must adapt to the speaker (12).

In this insight, as we have seen, Emerson agees with the Sufi and Zen
rhetoricians who preceded him. Presented speech, either in oratory or in writing, is
best seen as having only one m purpose. While its key purpose is for the
benefit of the presenter, its public purpose is to provoke. The work of rhetoric is
not to prove but to discover and perceive.

Emerson may not always have been comfortable with such a conclusion
himself. Nor did he come to this conclusion easily or quickly. Yet, as in all
learning which he recommended to others, he gained insight into the relationship
between the personal and public roles of discourse W.

As Roberta Ray reminds her own readers, Emerson was one of the first
Americans to make a career of lecturing. He is said to have wanted to become a
professor of rhetoric. According to Ray, his concept of the orator in society was
not to "convert men to one’s own faith, but rather, to persuade men of their own
innate worth" (216).

Emerson’s unique theory of rhetorical invention relates, once again, according
to Ray, to his distinction between reason and understanding—quoting an Emerson
letter to his brother:

Reason is the highest faculty of soul—what we mean often by the
soul itself; it never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives; it is
vision. The understanding toils all the time, compares, contrives,
adds, argues, near sighted but strong sighted...(219)

Whereas most theories of invention have to do with Emerson’s category of

231

understanding, he is most concerned with "reason" (219); hence life is a "quest for
inspiration" (220). To Emerson, the orator is an artist who can "express the
correspondence of the material and spiritual worlds" (221). Oratory can create of
the audience new artists (222). I

The orator is a poet in his ability to represent spiritual facts by natural
symbols,ananalogistinhisawareness ofthe divinitywithinhim, 3min
his awakening of the sluggish multitude (222-23). In Emerson’s rhetorical theory
man is a god to be freed (225). The function of the orator is to "provoke men to
see, feel, and live by that truth which comes from the oversoul" (224).

Even earlier (1960), Herbert Wichelns best summarized both Emerson’s
theory and the resultant rhetorical tools in relation to that theory. Wichelns
behevesthagthroughaperiodoftime,Emerson"foundhistruecallingandhis
right relation to his hearers by making himself thoroughly independent of them"
(502). His education occurred in working on more than 170 half-hour sermons
(506), leading him more and more away from convention and toward the starting
of a "positive doctrine that would have meaning for others" (507-11) and combat
the "endless doing" of men whose energy "narrowed their minds" (514).

The method he developed for presenting his ideas Wichelns summarizes as
follows: "He had a command of incandescent phrase-now direct exhortation, now
homely image, now sparkling metaphor, now concrete fact in condensed and

forcible statement" (516).

 

By now you may be wondering what has become of the Emersonians, the
Sufis, the Zennists in the modern academy. Is the metaphorical east in western
rhetoric fading or sharpening its focus? What are the prophecies for the twenty-
first century?

Some may argue that Sufic ideas and practices of rhetoric served their time
and place: but can their insights be adapted to the postmodern world of large
universities, mass media, and the worldwide web? If Sufi ideas and practices
enliven individuals’ capacities for creative imagination, they may be more relevant
than ever. If the Sufi notion of the adaptivity of the truth is itself true, that
adaptation should be going on around us constantly whether we know it or not.

Some may also argue that the extreme doubts in the Zen tradition regarding
the usefulness of language itself by definition prevent Zen from being relevant to
a modern western world producing far more writing than any previous civilization.
Yet the Zen search for m however it may be thought about or defined,
continues strong in countless westerners, whether they have ever heard of Zen or
not. Even western critics may delight in discussing Zen moments in the poetry of,
say, Wordsworth or Wallace Steven or Robert Bly. Academic curricula include
units on Asiatic poetry, often including satori poems. Western readers make,
through their purchasing power, books illuminating eastern insight very popular-
W2! and W among them-

Likewise, Richard Poirier and others argue for a profound Emersonian

233
influence on American writers like William James, Robert Frost, or Wallace

Stevens—even if that which is most Emersonian about them has made these same
writers troublesome to modernist critics.

And, I would argue, in postmodern research on rhetoric the Emersonian
tradition is alive and well, even among those who don’t claim their ancestry. The
best example, I believe, is Kurt Spellmeyer in his WM
Undemding, nnd Qe flfeacmng' 9f Qnmflition. His crystallizing work can offer
a test case by which to establish the need for more Sufi-Zen-Emersonian
approaches to rhetoric and pedagogy as well as encouraging willingness to pay
attention to them.

Spellmeyer began his own transformation as a teacher where I did: his felt
experience of the gulf between theory and practice, between school-life and other
life, between the metaphorical west and the metaphorical east. In Spellmeyer’s
"Prologue" he begins by describing the "two cultures" of his experience as related
to the perceived crisis of literacy in our society (vii). If we live in a society which
exaggerates the "culture of interpretation"-that is, of analysis and persuasion—our
society unwittingly fails to focus on the "power to make meaning" (viii) on our
own. This longing to have the "power to make meaning," if allowed to express
itself, relates to the Sufi’s will to walk in the space between himself and God in
the home of the angels’ creative imagination; it relates to the Zen aspirant’s will to
clear her mind of all borrowed illusions in order to discover her authentic self in a
moment of pure awareness; and it relates to the Emersonian thirst for power that

comes from resisting conventions, including rhetorical ones: most people may

234

prefer second-hand thoughts, I repeat, but another "will prefer the gandeur of
that law which he finds in himself."

It is just that the W of Sufism, Zen, or Ralph Waldo Emerson seem
so foreign to us. We wonder how to make such a diction authentically our own.

Spellmeyer makes it clear that help in this regard will not come from
Hirschean lists. Facts in themselves are useless things:

Students are often unable to read actively and write perceptively,

not because they have yet to learn the codes of our culture, but

because these codes are so familiar-familiar rather than meaningful-

-that students cannot make the cultural text Inns commonplace and

cliched, in ways that would facilitate the enlargement of

understanding. (125)
These students must learn to Lenin the cultural text, just as Emerson did, not
become yet more satisfied with the text. Background knowledge, Spellmeyer
shows, is in itself useless in making the two cultures become "mutually
problematic" (125). Or, in sum, the "educational decline Hirsch blames on cultural
illiteracy" Spellmeyer attributes to an academic pedagogy "that discourages
students from transposing ’our’ knowledge into their lived worlds" (126).

In the education-based world we have created, one created with good
democratic intentions, we have insured for our students and often for ourselves a
geater and geater tension between the two cultures. We have forced a choice.
Spellmeyer has good names for the choice: "either to dn or to understand, either
to practice or reflect on practice" (13). We have continued to insist too much on

understanding and reflection at the expense of Emersonian ncnnn.

The Sufis would call this action prayer, the Zennists meditation, Emerson

235
m. In all three cases, the unabashed focus would be on gnlf and seldom on
culture or society. This is just why, in Ennnn, Emerson so subversively insisted
that society never advances.

No wonder Sufi-Zen-Emersonian texts so self-consciously resist the texts. It is
not a question of anti-social or anti-intellectual bias. It is a celebration of the
creative self.

Spellmeyer would say "Wis"; literacy is not to teach codes and
forms, and rhetoric is not a tool of social manipulation. To use language is to
M resist the very reality of language.

Just as Ibn ’Arabi said he wrote books in order to rid himself of what was in
his mind, in order to go on from there, Spellmeyer remembers to ask why people
write books at all. Is it to "re-instate" order or also to "challenge and transform" it?
(32). Looked at this way, the Sufi-Zen-Emersonian resistance to language is
necessary because the M of language is so thoroughly epistemological:

A progam of education that represents knowledge as true in itself,

good in itself, may preserve the authority of the past-«and with it the

authority of the school and state—but it does so by ignoring the

present, or those aspects of the present which distinguish today from

events that have gone on before. (Spellmeyer 97)
Thisiswhywe and our studentsmayfeelsotrapped between two cultures. Itisas
though we have really nothing to do ifwe are only asked to imitate and learn. We
wish to m. As Spellmeyer says, the failure of the scholastic tradition is not
seeing knowledge as "something that has to be produced" (70).

If success in school and society means what it meant to Richard Rodriguez in

h'n 1982 W—that is, the ideal of disinterested knowledge for the

236
sake of conformity and acceptance-the self must be sacrificed. Quoting

Rodriguez, "Once I learned public language, it would never again be easy for me
to hear intimate family voices" (in Spellmeyer 29). If our society and its ideas
about literacy are to mean an admonition to "suppress feelings and beliefs for the
sake of public approval," that will foster an attitude of "calculating alienation"
(Spellmeyer 108). But this is the very gulf from which Sufi-Zen-Emersonian m
permits an escape.

Ifonlywe couldleamtofacilitate this escape mm. Bynowwe have
learned for sure that certain pedagogical ideas, though well-meaning, are counter-
productive. We have learned that we can’t first teach the skills in isolation before
asking students to practice and apply these same skills. In composition, we have
learned that we can’t first teach mnggln and then expect innovation. If knowledge
is, as according to Spellmeyer, "dialogical from the ground up, then [the demand
for imitation before innovation] may ensure the very failure that teachers intend to
prevent" (45 ).

Wearelearningthatthefocusneedstobeminthenexusofthe
Emersonian "loose fitting" self. We 519 want to teach creativity, but we have not
known how to do so within the context of the classroom. For long we have known
that real knowledge is not given, but mndnubut we have not always acted like it.

The pedagogy of the "place between" is thoroughly spiritual, thoroughly
related to the mystic way. We need not apologize for that or try to seem ashamed,
within our own academic communities, if our dedication to such a place makes us

seem anti-intellectual (which we are not). It is all right for us not to claim to know

237

answers.

But we fl know what to do. What to do, in Spellmeyer’s terms, is to 1%
W new and contemporary strategies of resistance (16). We need to
work ELEM to identify a different sort of rhetorical goal, one not talked about
in many rhetorics. This goal will not be imitation of some "public language"
(Spellmeyer 19); nor, as Poirier has shown, will this goal he to reinforce the
modernist focus on definitive and difficult texts. Rather, our goal will be, in
resistance to language, the creation of our very own selves.

For decades some teachers have taken all too seriously their perceived duties
as, in Spellmeyer’s words, "guardians of the public truth" (88), those who have
revered the rhetorical models and the cultural ideas which they have treated as
holy. Bu; "If we reject the idea of education as a dialogue between students and
teachers," one which allows both goups to amrm "local" and personal knowledge,
then we perpetuate the devaluing of lived experience in order to preserve a truth
"that belongs to no one, except possibly those authorities who have purchased
their speech at a price of a far more pervasive silence" (Spellmeyer 145). As
teachers ourselves, we will really mean what we say, when we agee with
Spellmeyer, if we are willing to accept uncomfortable pedagogical categories—or
few categories at all.

Spellmeyerrecognimasldothatnewkindsofwritingandreadingwillbe
required if we are to overcome our inherited "logophobic" fear of "polyvalence"

(56). If, in spite of what we say about the primacy of creativity and the need to

empomromstudenmweremainmwewfllbeperpetuafingin

238

ourselves the very gulf in experience we had hoped to bridge.

We will remain like those described by Spellmeyer who, "if there is a
discrepancy between reasoned scrutiny and decorum, opt for decorum every time”
(56). I believe that, if we are to have any real dialogue with students at all, the
best subject for that dialogue will be discrepancy itself.

Spellmeyer summarizes all of the beautifully in what I take to be his m
early in his Show:

Iwillargueforadialogicalpedagogythatrecognizesindividualsas

real players in the social game, conscious agents who are never

altogether powerless, unaware, or passive in their relations to others;

never just creations, always reflective creators of both their own
identities, and the social worlds they inhabit. I hope to suggest that

we ourselves have become successful, have gained some measure of

control over our life process, by circumventing the ascetic regimen

normally imposed upon our students, and that by continuing to

impose a regimen of this kind, we do not in fact prepare them for

the tasks we have undertaken, but obscure the real sources of our

creativity and power. (32)

If we "continue to impose a regimen" of western rhetoric which may emphasize
imitation of models or patterns of persuasion-and if we "continue to impose a
regimen" of cultural facts embodied in Hirschean lists—we arrive back where we
began in Chapter One. You stand with me before my Lebanese students staring
into the gulf between; you go down with me, disconsolate, to the border fence
between the metaphorical east and the metaphorical west.

Spellmeyer’s "manifesto" has two key implications within the context of the
Sufi-Zen-Emersonian notions of the place between.

The first has to do with the teacher-person. This person, in Spellmeyer’s

terms, is not unlike the Sufi master who cannot tell the aspirant what is true for

239
him or hen-only a daily dialogue can occur, the subject of which is the discrepancy
between two kinds of knowledge and the creative potential between in meditation,
recitation, and prayer. Nor can the Zen roshi lead a single person to
enlightenment in the Nothingness of Tao. The roshi can ask and answer questions,
write lectures and poems, shock and scare others into illumination. His is the
place between Truth and delusion, the Now and linear time. Similarly, the teacher,
if considering Spellmeyer in earnest, is much like the Emersonian m. Such a
person is a motivator, agitator, a creator of aphoristic flashes, in modern terms
almost a charismatic leader.

That Emerson thought ofhimselfinthese termsisbest revealedinhis two
essays called "Eloquence" (1847 and 1867). In the 1847 essay, Emerson argues that
an orator must have a kind of physical health or W He is willing to
accept that large numbers of hearers will be influenced first by his character and
W by ideas. Yet Emerson does not in this way emphasize the moral
weakness of beautiful speaking or rhetorical effectiveness; rather he emphasizes
the grave responsibility of one who has a great theme. Great people or geat
speakers, he says, do not m but rnnkg their themes: "Eloquence is the
appropriate organ of the highest personal energy". In the later (1867) essay,
Emerson is even more clear about implications for pedagogy. He insists that there
can be no real school of eloquence, nor a series of lessons universally effective.
Learners must learn eloquence the way they learn to swim—by plunging in.

The second key implication of Spellmeyer’s manifesto focuses on students.

Students must be free to discover a way to say what they mean (for now)-to read

240
and write authentically. We will need to learn how to m students to create

their own relevance (of course, again, by learning to occupy the place between).
As Spellmeyer conchldes in his own book, specialized knowledge can become
useful to students only when "our" questions help them to "resolve theirs" (218).
This will mean for us a radical redefining of M519.

Specifically MAS! will mean violating many of our cherished inherited
pedagogical practices. We will have to call the attention for students, to students
of their "situatedness" (Spellmeyer l 11); we must encomge their resistance. This
will mean mm what we regard as misreadings of literature. In referring to
the opposite "filter, absorb, and digest" model of literacy education, Spellmeyer
agrees with Friere-and both are thoroughly Emersonian: that is, students trained
in the factory model can never learn to see "inquiry as conversation" (113). We
must allow and celebrate in our students any tentativeness or indirection in their
ways of writing about their world. And we must let students bring extratextual
knowledge to bear on their readings. Students will do so anyway. We must be
willing to begin our misation from there.

In all the above, rather than devoting ourselves to preserving the sameness in
the continuity of culture, we need to believe without apology in Emersonian self-
reliance and in the creative potential of Ibn ’Arabi’s place between. It is not by
accident that, in agitating for the power of each person’s resistance W to
language itself and to the culture it preserves, Emerson wrote in m
aphoristically, that m never advances.

Are we willing to let our students and ourselves really believe this?

241
Spellmeyer concludes his book not only by expressing such willingness, but also

by extending this inclusive good will to the critics. He does so by saying that ngn
Peter Elbow and David Batholomae are right (274). This conclusion reminds me
immediately of Mark Wiley’s 1990 article called "Writing in the American Grain:
Peter Elbow and David Batholomae’s Emersonian Pedagogies of Empowerment."

Wiley identifies "writing in the American gain" the way I have defined it,
thoughIseethegainasfarmorethanAmerican:"writingintheAmericangrain
is an attempt to see the world with fresh eyes, ’to form an original relation to the
universe,’ as Emerson insisted (m 1:7). It relies on the individual experience as
the route to achieve authority as a writer, and even though the expression of that
experience must be translated into cultural codes, the duty of each writer is to
resist the external authority of those codes in order to make language one’s own
again" (57). Furthermore, Wiley sees the common gound between Elbow and
Bartholomae as concern with W in resistance to language.

But Wiley is troubled about ways in which, under the influence either of
Elbow or Bartholomae, students will gain authority over their own texts. Rightly,
Wiley asserts that authority for Elbow is achievement in m a quality which is
"descrl'bable but not definable" (58); Wiley ascribes to Elbow’s work a sort of
Emersonian immaturity, as in Emerson’s own famous words: it is the wise man’s
duty to "pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things" (CW 1
20 in Wiley 59). Wiley is also right to see authority in Bartholomae’s work as
being achieved "both within and against one’s community" (Wiley 62) as we

struggle to become members of a discourse community. And Wiley is right to see

242
the common gound between Elbow and Bartholomae as the recoglition of the

value of "individual experience" (63).

Even so, on the question of how students will learn to achieve and value their
own voice or their own texts, Wiley is troubled about issues which only a fuller
understanding of Emerson can address—or relating to the cross-cultural and trans-
historical aspects of the Mn. He is concerned that the struggle for form
willneverend. Sufis,Zennists,andEmersonwouldcelebratethis.Wileyis
worried that writing in these American pedegogies, while helping writers to move
away from the past and toward the future, take the writer mm the present.
Yet this is just what the rhetoric of the Mn is designed W
Wiley’s concern that students’ achieved power can only be temporary (65) is an
inevitability that only further m can forestall.

Even more troubling to Wiley is that we have found no way to "tell [students]
why this authority is valuable" (65). But I think they already know: it is to achieve
a triumph over the self, even if only temporarily, the Emersonian "loose-fitting"
self again—a rhetoric of personal and spiritual insight in the place between that
ameliorates our felt alienation in the gulf between two cultures.

This very issue is absolutely central to all being argued in these related essays.
It is essential in answering the rhetor’s perpetual searching for m. And
the path is readily available in Emerson’s theory of the creative imagination.

The problem here is familiar to anyone teaching literature or writing in the
late twentieth century who is aware if the research on literacy over the past few

decades. As Wiley too has shown, even apparently contradictory "camps"-in his

243
article represented by Elbow and Bartholomae-agee that the first hurdle in a

holistic language arts class is to help students overcome their borrowed or
bureaucratic language: first to recogrize the problem and then to have some
dialogue about it. The second step, in almost all research going back to Britten’s
goundbreaking studies, is to make room in our theory and practice for e_xnressive
language. Writers need to begin with their personal experience and work from
there. Hence Elbow’s optimistic work on £919: and Bartholomae and Petosky’s
work on moving from personal language toward membership in a discourse
community.

It is beyond that our pedegogies begin to break down. In a writing course that
begins with description, journal writing, and personal narrative and intends to
move toward more and more public presentation (exposition, argument, even the
research paper), for most students the developmental process breaks down
somewhere. We don’t know just hm to give students the power we want them to
have over public presentation. We believe students need to include in their own
developing philosophies of rhetoric both discursive and presentational abilities.
And our teaching from models or patterns of argument produces, for most, less
and less m and more and more imitation.

Our frustration is something Emerson understood too well. Merely to assert
that students will find their own way in an open and dialogical environment may
not promote success. As Merton Sealts, Jr. reminds us in his "Mulberry Leaves
and Satin: Emerson’s Theory of the Creative Process," Emerson too "regarded

philosophical idealism as unsatisfactory" (81). Quoting from Emerson’s Nature,

244
Sealts reminds us that idealism "leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my own

perceptions, to wander without end," and, worse yet, "leaves God out of me" (Q
1 37-38 in Sealts 81).

In the Emersonian n_c_ti_on of the creative imagination, there is an energy or
force Mn person and God exactly like Zen satori and exactly like Ibn ’Arabi’s
middle world of angels. This is a force which simultaneously streams out of me
andintomewhenGodis,inthe Now, creatingthroughmeandlamcomingto
God to create Him. This is what Emerson calls Mg; Sealts calls it "outward
expression of inward energy" (84); I would add the simultaneous energy of inward
expression of outward energy. The rhetoric of the place between must act in this
mediation.

Emerson’s best expression of this mediation, an expression which draws him
closesttotheSufisandtoZen,isinhisessay"Art."Emersonusestheterm
W- I would argue that the individuation, not argument or analysis or
culturally encoded public presentation, is the appropriate end (following, as in the
writing class) an understanding of resistance and a freeing up of personal
expression.

So much in keeping with the Sufi and Zen "traditions," Emerson everywhere
asserts that what any writer or artist produces "is the least part of his work." What
matters is, in Emerson’s words, "the universal soul" expressing itself through the
artist as nggnt. What the artist must do is (quoting Emerson) "disindividualize
himself, and be a man...through whom the soul of Q]! men circulates...and an organ
through which the universal mind acts" (EL 2 42-54 in Sealts 84).

245
The goal of rhetoric when looked at these ways is thoroughly spiritual and to a

much lesser extent practical. It is neither to be logical and objective and
disinterested in the intellectual sense nor to be expressive and affective in the
poetical sense. It is something between, depersonalized and free of illusions—just
as it is for the Sufis and the Zennists.

Here is the true meaning, apart from all intellectual discourse about them, of
the nnflrnl or the transcendental aspects of what we have preferred to call
Emerson’s romantic rhetoric. He really means it when he says that art is, at the
moment of its creation, both an expression of the Divine mind and an
achievement of the individual spirit. He really means it (in "Art") when he says
that expressions of the "true artist" are "discovered gin gecuted" rather than
"arbitrarily composed" (on the basis of imitative models or recognized rhetorical
patterns). As long as we insist only on two nlagg, writing as modelled public
presentation or writing as spontaneous personal expression, our dialogic discourse
with students will not find an energy for the W where, for Emerson,
"every genuine work of art" is rooted in "the constitution of thing" and has "as
much reason for being as the earth and the sun" (in Sealts 84).

In this regard we are also exactly wrong when we argue that our role as
coaches of writers is to help them place themselves fully within the culture and
language of their own time and place. They will not themselves feel at home
there. If we are to help ourselves and others to M the place between of
the actual angels, we must believe as Emerson did, as a practicing mystic, "that a

man never rises so high as when he takes himself out of historical time" (Bevis

246
49). In the non-dual moments of illumination of the Zennists or the Sufis, or in

the moments of illumination which Emerson experienced, only there can one
abandon oneself to true spontaneity (Bevis 49), escaping the past and the future in
the eternal now.

The rhetoric for this experience is W non western and related, from
our western side of the fence, to the metaphorical east. In the words of Bevis,
"Ihe Emersonian ecstasy 'm not induced by linear progessions, may not be
comprehended by progressive mental acts, and may not be reflected by
progessive models" (50).

Ifwritinghasanykeypurposeforreaders,itwillbetoshockandamazeand
maneuver them into ecstasies of their own. It will not be reasonable. And it will
not be personally expressive. But it will have M. This means that the
"discontinuous form" (Bevis 53) of Emerson’s essays and lectures, Sufi texts, or
Zen poems/Technes" will be a purpose in itself.

Meaning will have no primacy (Bevis 52), but only tone. Purposive
discontinuous speech will not arise from "frenzied, irrational...prompting" but
from a detached will to hold the mirror to the self. It is to do no less that we are
calledintothenmmn.Itistodonolessthatwearecalledtoactwithour

students.

247
graduation

Only now are we in a position fully to see how misunderstanding Ralph Waldo
Emerson or under-valuing the rhetoric of the East or failing to help students to
realize the potential of their own creative power—all are part of the same negative
energy. All are part of the same failure to gasp the relationship between rhetoric
and the self. All are ways to ignore the reality of the W.

To see how these failures are related is to be forced to define mm:
in rhetorical terms, between the categories of western intellectual analysis on the
one hand, and, on the other hand, self-expressiveness as a value in itself.

While it is our obligation thoroughly to teach our students the usefulness of
argumentation and logical analysis in the Aristotelian tradition, we must also be
willing to explore with them the sense in which these categories are a convenient
fabrication. To see the limitations of tropic answers to rhetorical problems would
mean to teach resistance to them. Just as Ibn ’Arabi developed a way of writing to
£331 "the conceptual development of a dialectic carried on according to the laws
of Aristotelian logic" (Corbin 74), we can teach ourselves and our students how to
judge when such logic meets or does not meet our rhetorical needs. Just as
Zennists argue against faith in merely linguistic solutions to problems-
demonstrating how representations of reality are easier to accept than reality
itself—we can question with our students the discrepancy between real experience
and the available ways to talk about it. Just as Emerson may be said to have made

his discourse W (when measured against standards of logical

248

arrangement and amplification), we can encourage the creative power of
aphorism, surprise, and revelation.
Not to do so means to accept mere data and the ways people have ageed to
talk about that data not only as convention but also, mistakenly, as truth.
Assuming that logical proof is an end in itself, the standard by which all
rhetoric is to be judged, ignores Lao-tzu’s insights on the futility of contention (see
Oliver 235) and forestalls questioning of the artificial and conventionalized aspects
of life within one’s own intellectual culture. I remind you again of Spellmeyer’s
view of students:
Students are often unable to read actively and write perceptively,
not because they have to learn the codes of our culture, but because
these codes are so familiar-familiar rather than meaningful-«hat
students cannot make the cultural text [pg commonplace and
cliched, in ways that would facilitate the enlargement of
understanding. (125)
We must help our students to gasp not only how gaded skills and established
forms are to be learned but also how to enhance their instincts and intuitions. We
can learn to film with them that the struggle for form will never end.
Similarly, we can resist in our lives as teachers and writers the western cultural
emphasis on self and self-expression. Correctly and necessarily our process
pedagogy begins with self-exploration: we encourage free-writing, journal-writing,
autobiographical essay writing, personal exploration, and m. Correctly we
emphasize the importance of personal ownership of writing to prevent mere

imitation of models. Yet we may be failing to help these same students to see self-

exploration as far more than an end in itself.

249
Such a failure relates directly to frequent misunderstanding of Emerson

himself. Despite Emerson’s exhaustive personal energies to inspire and to steer his
audiences away from both selfish individualism and geedy mercantilism, he failed
to impact the general direction of . the American democracy because he was
misunderstood. He is himself often accused to this day of fostering both selfishness
and commercialism (see Versluis).

Self-knowledge or the celebration of the selfs own voice are antithetical to the
energies of Sufism, Tao'nm, and Emersonian Transcendentalism—all three. What
Sufis call the Knowledge of the Real is a quality of awareness above all states,
whether real or metaphorical drunkenness, which a single self may experience.
The entire purpose of Zen meditation is to dissolve the boundaries between self
and world in a moment of illumination; even the satori poem itself, the poem
which records the supreme moment of awareness, has nothing to do with personal ,
expressiveness.

Likewise, what the rhetoric of Emerson has to teach us has nothing to do with
either modernism or romanticism—rather with a way of knowing that precedes or
can exist independent from all the -isms which western criticism has invented.
Emerson’s understandingofthe selfis thekeytohowall this is so.

The work of Richard Poirier has already been summarized in ways which show
Emerson as antithetical to modernism. In questioning even the possibility of verbal
solutions, Emerson denies the modernist veneration for difficult texts. In denying
the need to spend one’s energy on building up a self from fragments and ruins,

Emerson obliterates the sense of modernist technique. And, in Poirier’s own

250
summary, as in Sufi or Zen ideas and practices, Emerson was "antagonistic to any
kind of institutionalized discourse about literature or about ideas generally; [he]
was antagonistic to ’thinking’ as a profession" (50).

Recently, in his Wears Arthur
Versluis’ key insight is that Emerson escaped the limitations of romanticism as
well. Versluis sees selfllood, the trap of romanticist solipsism, as the distinctive
Romantic trait; he notes that by 1850, by which time Emerson had read widely in
eastern religions and had begun to transcribe long sections of oriental texts into
his journal (66), Emerson would write in W:

In all nations, there are minds which incline to dwell in the

conception of the fundamental Unity. The raptures of prayer and

ecstasy of devotion lose all being in one Being. This tendency finds

its highest expression in the religious writing of the East, and chiefly

in the Indian scriptures....Those writing contain little else than this

idea, and they rise to pure and sublime strains in celebrating it. (91

IV: 28)
In writing this, Emerson resisted, according to Versluis, the "particularizing thrust"
(65) of the Romantic era, that era which explored and celebrated chiefly the self.

If you think it curious for Emerson to write W as a whole
book about individuals if he believed the self is an illusion, do not despair. For, as
Versluis reminds us, the first essay is called "The Uses of Great Men"; he quotes
Emerson aptly: "Ihere needs but one wise man in a company, and all are wise,-so
rapid is the contagion. Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from
egotism, and enable us to see other people and their works" (531/ IV: 15). Great

men and women do not become geat so that they can build up or celebrate the

self; rather, they are geat in their detachment from self and in the clarity of their

251

actions.

Chiefly the East taught Emerson the universality of illusion. He learned by this
to include the illusion of the self. Versluis’ summary is perfect: "Insufficient
attention has been paid to Emerson’s focus on transcending the self, for it is here,
on the poet’s illumination or inspiration, that Emerson’s works are often actually
centered. Pivitol here are [both] Platonism and the Vedanta" (67).

Could this mean anything to us when we go into class on Monday? Indeed. It
means that we will start in our pedagogy with autobiogaphy, personal expression,
narrative, opening the pores to direct observation. It means that we will also
concentrate on work toward analysis and logic and academic research when
purpose and audience require those very thing. Yet we will continue to struggle
to get students m personal expression :9 analysis; we will ask, with our students,
what is between or beyond.

We need to make as our ultimate goal not mere efficiency or competence—not
even only the personal voice that Peter Elbow and others celebrate. Instead the
goal might be the Emersonian effacement of the self—exploration, ultimately, of
language as a 3991 for Truth, not just a skill but also an inspiration. Emerson in his
works is still prepared to show us not how to embrace the self-to explore the
psychological depths, to self-help our way into individual wholeness, to live locked
into our own mental image of the universe—but rather to rise above the self.

Such is Emerson’s Transcendentalism, which cannot properly be called
Romanticism at all:

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond

252
the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a

new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to
the nature of thing; that beside his privacy of power as an
individual man, there is a geat public power on which he can draw,
by unlocking at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal
tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the
life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his
words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. (From
"The Poet" CW 1:78)

The path to such a rhetoric for ourselves and for our students may be thought
to be ham-through Emerson and into the East. Or it may be thought to be
{gm-into the future which even now we are engaged in the process of making.
Oryoumaythinkofit onceagainasanlnqgm; since reallyithasnothing
to do with time at all—only with assimilation and transmutation-4t can be thought
to be all three.

It is thus that if we understand Emerson as a man, struggling against the tide
of both traditional intellectual structures nng the impulse toward self-expression,
for whom assimilation of the East clarified an intuition to self-transcendence—only
then can we appreciate how vital was his energy even in its partial failure. If, in
Versluis’ words, he "plundered the world’s religious texts for insights, but he
seldom did them an injustice in his presentation of them" (78), then we too may
be justified in plundering his works as well as those to which his were referents.
We would tend only to demonstrate our own misunderstanding of Emerson’s
works if, either only analyzing them or only expressing our personal reactions to
them, we did any less than he did: "He did not simply read the Upanishads [for
example], he assimilated and reproduced them" (V ersluis 78).

One name for all this is mysticism. But most teachers would have a hard time

253
allowing it in any discussion of modern pedagogy. Even so, looking at all writing
which emerges in the process of self-transcendence, it will not be out of place to
speak, as the Sufis did, of "ardent talk." Martin Ling, you may recall, defined the
real mystical doctrine as "the summons of the Mind to transcend itself' (63); or:
"To be known by God is thus mysteriously to be God" (65). How is this different
from Emerson in his journal, writing—again, I remind you: "Who shall define to me
an Individual? I behold with awe & delight many illustrations of the One
UniversalMind.Iseemybeingembeddedinitlamonlyaform ofhimHeis
the soul of Me. I can even with a mountainous aspiring say, M" (M
ME V:336).

Emerson knew in both a deeply personal and in a deeply detached way the
sense in which the self-transcendent imagination alone can make things real. That
reality is denied to any of us only by cutting us off from the language of prophetic
and creative power. Emerson would have keenly understood Corbin writing about
Ibn ’Arabi: "God describes Himself to us through ourselves" (115). He would have
understood Zen resistance to language, if he had known about it, because he has
already assimilated it through Hindu scriptures (at the root common between
himself and Zen). And this is the very sense in which the ancient texts were not
interesting to Emerson for their antiquity: all must be gathered into the here and
now.

It turns out, then, that Emerson’s enduring problem is exactly our own. If we
too, as teachers and students and writers, are to escape accusation as intellectual

"colonizers" (Versluis 5), we must deal in practical and concrete terms with the

254
Emersonian "literary religion" (Versluis 51)—his assimilation and transmutation at
the nexus of the disindividualized self, W. How are we to turn this
literary religion into actual power for the here and now? How can we, in our own
time and place, transform the good name of intuition into practical deeds?

As for the Sufis, the Zennists, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, the transformation
of intuition into practical power will center on the role of teachers in learning.
Teachers of this type must be spontaneous and, though intelligent and aware of
pedagogical concepts, free from conventions, repetitions, and consistencies. While
insisting that students read and write, teachers of this type will remember that
texts are only tools, forms are necessarily impermanent, and the real subject of
education is, as for Emerson and his predecessors, assimilation and transmutation,
selflessness and self-transcendence. Teachers of this type will forever struggle to
reconcile two facts: (l) tradition is an "encysting of truth" (V ersluis 51), whereas
the root of real spiritual truth appears at times as a kind of incoherence, or
rapture, or even insanity; and (2) in the midst of this apparent chaos of creative
power is the reality—forever in the process of being made-of the engendering
place between, a place demanding its own language, a place being surely referred
to by Emerson in Bppresentntive Men: "All philosophy of east and west has the
same centripetence" (fl IV: 28).

I give to Ralph Waldo Emerson the final words:

That which we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily.
("Ihe Over-Soul" in Miller, ed. 941)

Noanswerinwordscanreplytoaquesfloninthingsltisnotinan
arbitrary"decreeofGod,"butinthenatureofmanthataveil shuts

255

downonthefactsoftomormmforthesoulwillnothaveusread
any other cipher than that of cause and effect. By this veil, which
curtains events, it instructs the children of men to live in today. The
only mode of obtaining an answer to these questions of the senses,
is,toforegoalllowcuriosity,and,acceptingthetideofbeingwhich
floats us intothe secretofnature, work and live, work and live, and
allunawares,theadvancingsoulhasbuiltandforgedforitselfa
new condition, and the question and answer are one. ("Ihe Over-
Soul" in Miller, ed. 941)

Bibliogaphy

If],

Bibliography

Sufism

’Abbad, Ibn of Rhonda. gnu: on thg Sufi Bath. Trans. John Renard, S.J. New
York: Paulist Press, 1986.

Al-’Arabi, Ibn. WM. Trans. R.W.J. Austin. New York: Paulist
Press, 1980.

--. Inn Sufis of Andalusia. The Ruh al-quds and al-Durrant al fakhirah of Ibn
Arabi. Trans. R.W.J. Austin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971.

Andrae, Tor. Wm. Trans. Birgitta Sharpe. Albany: University
of New York Press, 1987.

Ansari, Kwaja Abdullah. Innm' ate Conversan'onp. Trans. Wheeler M. Thackston.
New York: Paulist Press, 1978.

Arberry. AJ. W. London: George Allen
and Unwin, Ltd., 1950.

’Ata’Illah, Ibn. The flk of an’ om. Trans. Victor Danner. New York: Paulist
Press, 1978.

Corbin,Henry.9-=- ._ ' ' :
Manheim. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

 

Eyre, Ronald. "Ihere Is No God, But God." Video tape. The Lpng Mch #5.
New York: British Broadcasting System and Time/Life Video, 1978.

Izutsu, Toshihiko. A mepnrntive §tug of thn Key Eflosophig Concepts E
W. 1966. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Ling, Martin. S S ' f th 'e Ce . Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1971.

---. W? Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Massingnon, Louis. Testimpnjps and Reflpptjpg: m pf Lnnn’ Massingnon.
Herbert Mason, ed. South Bend: University of N otre Dame Press, 1989.

257

258
Shah, Idries, ed. The W91 pf the Spfi. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1970.

Smith, Margaret. The Belgian Mfin'cs: Ana. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1932.
Snfigm. San Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1971.

I o' 1 E 1 ll .
Bemson, Mary Hammond and Elaine Magnusson, eds. Modenn J nmn: An idea

flk for £42 fl'nncnern. Seattle: East Asia Resource Center, University of
Washington, 1984.

Capra, Fritjof. W. New York: Bantam, 1976.
Cleary Thomas. ed. W

on uthentic Tao Te an e
Izn. Trans. Thomas Cleary. New York: Harper, 1993.

Dumoulin, Heinrich. WM. LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court
Books, 1976.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. WM. 1974. Boston: Beacon Press,
1976.

Herrigal, E. W. New York: Pantheon Books, 1953.
Hoff, Benjamin. M New York: Penguin. 1980.

   

--. W New York: Penguin, 1990.
Izutsu, Toshihiko. . =_ -' _ ' : Co '
Sufism Q51 Innis ism. 1966. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Kapleau,Philip. L‘ '1"f__ n: ai-"1=m' _ "rte M'I
Boston: BeaconPress,1965.

Kasulis, T.P. WM. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press,
1981.

Oliver, Robert T. n. ' ° - ‘
Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1971

 

259

Finis. Robert M MW- N ew York:
Bantam, 1975.

Scott, David and Tony Doubleday. W. Rockport,
Massachusetts: Element Books, 1992.

Styrk, Incion and Takashi Ikemoto, eds Wm
WM. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1963.

Suzuki, D.T. WW. Kyoto, 1934. New York: Philosophical
library, 1949.

Watts, Alan. film Wny pf an. New York: Penguin, 1957.

Woodcock, George. Thom; Merton: Moi; nnn [gt - A Qn'n'cal Stugy.
Vancouver: Douglas and Maclntyre, 1978.

W

Anderson, W.C. "Perceptual Affirmations, Unexplained: The Rhetoric of
Reiteration in Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson." W
Ml; 71 (February 1985): 37-51.

Beattie, Paul H. and Lucinda Beattie, eds. "Ralph Waldo Emerson and Unitarian
Universalism." W 22 (Spring 1988): 57-103.

Berlin, J .A. "Emerson and Romantic Rhetoric" in Berlin, J .A. W
MW Carbondalc= Southern Illinois

University.

Bevis, William. "Emerson: Ecstasy and Aphorism." W 5 (Fall 1982):
44-59. Press,

Brodwin, S. "Emerson’ s Version of Plotinus: The Flight to Beauty." 10 umal of me
W 35 (July 1979): 465-83 1931’-

Buell, Laurence J. "Unitarian Aestetics and Emerson’s Poet Priest." m
My]! 20 (September 1968): 3-20.

Carpenter, Frederic Ives. mam New York: Hendricks House, 1953.

 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. It -
York: Wise, 1929.

 

Ferguson, Marianne. "What Eastern Religions Teach Us About Religious
Education." Wm 84 (Spring 1989): 165-73.

Gelpi, Donald. "Endless Seeker: The Religious Quest of Ralph Waldo Emerson."
MW 52 (Summer 1992): 592

Goodman, Russell B. "East-West Philosophy in Nineteenth Century America:

Emerson and Hinduism.” MW 5 1 (October-
December 1990): 625-45.

La Rosa, R.C. "Invention and Imitation ln Emerson’ s Early Lectures" M
m 44 (March 1972): 13-30.

Lee Roland F. "Through Keirkegaard: Toward a Definition of Emerson’s Theory
of Communication." ELH 24 (1957): 229-49.

Lieberman, Sheldon W. "Ihe Development of Emerson’s Theory of Rhetoric
1827-1836." W 41 (1969): 178-206.

- "Origins of Emerson’s Early Poetics: His Reading in the Scottish Common
Sense Critics." W 45 (March 1973): 23-33.

Miller. James E ed W
W .New York: Harcourt Brace J avanovrch, 1991.

Myerson. J 061. ed. W.
New York: Modern language Association, 1984.

Obeidat, Murwan. "Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Muslim Orient." Muslnn' Wogld
18 (April 1988): 132-145.

Packer, P. "Uriel’s Cloud: Emerson’s Rhetoric." W 31 (Summer
1977): 322-44.

5 New York:

 

Porte, Joel, ed. -__ .
University Press, 1982.

 

261

Ray, Roberta. "Ihe Role of Orator in the Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson."
WM 41 (1974): 215-225-

Sealts, Merton H. "Mulberry Leaves and Satin: Emerson’ s Theory of the Creative
Procesf' MW 9 (1985): 79-94

Shigematsu, Soiku. "Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Zen Universalism." Dialpg Ed
AME 2 (Spring 1988): 95-101.

Sloan, John B. "The Miraculous Uplifting: Emerson’s Relationship with His
Audience." W 52 (1966): 10-15-

Versluis, Arthur. . NC! a- -
Oxford University Press, 1993.

Wichelns, Herbert A. "Ralph Waldo Emerson." in W

American Enphp' Addrgsg, ed. William N. Briggance (New York: Russell
and Russell, 1960), 501-25.

  

. New York:

Wiley, Mark. "Writing in the American Grain: Peter Elbow’s and David
Bartholomae’s Emersonian Pedagogies of Empowerment." Edging
mm; 9 (Fall-Winter 1990): 57-66.

Yoder, R.A. "Emerson’s Dialectic." Qn'n'tn'sm 11 (Fall 1969): 313-328.

mm

Burnham, Sophy. . = - ‘ '
York: Ballantine, 1990.

 

Capra, Fritjof. Wig. 1976. New York: Bantam Books, 1983.

De Saint-Exupery, Antoine. In}; 1.1le Pring. Trans. Katherine Woods. New
York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1943.

Eliade. Mircea. WW Trans.
Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper and Row, 1959.

Kennedy, X.J. An W. Seventh Edition. New York: Harper
Collins, 1990.

May, Rollo. W. New York: Bantam, 1971.

 

262

Picard, Max. M. Trans. Stanley Goodman. South Bend:
Regnery/Gateway, 1952.

 

Augustine. W

Barthomomae, David. "Inventing the University." In Mike Rose, ed. When a
W. New York: Guilford Press, 1985.

Barthomomae, David and Anthony Petrosky WM

 

Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,

Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, eds. et
MW!» New York: Saint Martin’ 8, 1990
Britton, James.

 

madman New Yarn rennin. 1976

Carney Martin W New Yorle David McKay
Company, 1974.

Owner. Jan. et. a1. WW- Urbana, Illinoisz
NCTE, 1985.

Cooper, Jan. W. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1986.
Cooper, Marilyn. "The Ecology of Writing." Qpllgggjnglhh 48 (1986): 364-375.

Cocoon Marilyn and Michael Holman WM Upper
Montclair, New Jersey: Heinman/Boynton/Cook, 1989.

 

M New York: MacMillan,
Dixon, John. W 1967. Urbana, Illinois: NCTE, 1976.
Elbow, Peter. W. New York: Oxford, 1986.
--. W. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

   

Emig, Janet. It We f n .z.-.'._~.
Me 1983-

--. "Writing as A Mode of learning." QQQ 28 (1977): 122-128.

Ensland, David and Stephen Tchudi. eds WW3.
mm m We! April 1978

 

New York: Oxford. 1990 3

Flower, Linda and John R. Hayes. "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing." £29
32 (December 1990): 365-87.

Friere. Paolo and Donaldo Macedo. WWW
Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1987.

Friere, Paolo. W New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.

Fulwiler, Toby. fl'gcmn' g With Wn'ting. Upper Montclair, New Jersey:
Boynton/Cook, 1987.

Fulwiler. Toby and Art Young. eds. WWW

Wn'ting Across thg Curriculm. Upper Montclair, New Jersey:
Heinemann/Boynton/Cook, 1990.

Goswarni. Dixie and Peter Stillman. eds When
. . : - . _ qt: .w .Upper Montclair, New Jersey:

 

Boynton/Cook, 1987. A

Hairston, Maxine. "The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in
the Teaching of Writing." EC 33 (1982): 76-88.

Herron. Jeny- WW Benoit: Wayne
State University Press, 1988.

Horner, Winnefred, ed. __ < __
University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Illich, Ivan. W. New York: Harper and Row, 1970.
Judy, Stephen. W. New York: Oxford, 1980.

 

 

Kosinski. Leonard WW Ubana. Illinois:
NCTE, 1968.

Kutz, Eleanor and Hepzibah Roskelly. AnflngnthEgnLagpgy. Portsmouth, NH:
Boynton/Cool, 1991.

Martin, Nancy, et. a1. Wt"l-t-- : : finned 1'. London: Ward
Lock, 1976.

Moglin, Steven and Helene and Andrea Lunsford, eds. The Right To Liteggy.
MLA, 1990.

Murphy, James J., ed. to 'cal T diti e Wri ° New York:
MLA, 1982.

--. ed. A Withdraw Davis, California: Hermasoras
Press, 1990.

Ohmann, Richard. W New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Pattison, Robert. W. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Plato. mm.

--. gem.

Poirier, Richard. 1:; '

- ‘ : . New York:
Random House, 1987.

 

Rosenblatt, Louis. W New York: Noble and Noble, 1968.

--. W. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1978.

Scholes, Robert. W. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Shor, Ira and Paulo Friere. or 't tio : ’ o T formin
mp. Massachusetts: Bergin and Garvey, 1987.

265

Spellmeyer, Kurt. e U ers din d the Teac
91mm Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Stuckey, J. Ellspcth. MW. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook,

1991.
Tchndi, Stephen W 1986.
Willinsky, John. 'tera . edifinin R din d Writin in the

w. New York: Routledge, 1990.

"liiiiiiiiiiiiiii'“