Quest Magazine

Cycles of Faith: The Development of the World's Religions

By Robert Ellwood
Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003, Paperback, viii + 215 pages.

In Cycles of Faith: The Development of the World's Religions, Robert Ellwood, a retired professor of world religions, proposes a common developmental framework of five stages, lasting roughly five hundred years each, for the world's major extant religions-Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and the Chinese religions Confucianism and Taoism.

In this detailed and wide-ranging book Ellwood is careful to distinguish his framework from the historical meta-narratives and predictive schematizations of many social philosophers who, he declares, often reveal "more about the hopes and fears of their own age than about the veiled future." Rather than depending on a "grand mystical idea of meaning in history or the evolution of Absolute Spirit," Ellwood declares that his outline is based simply on "rational, empirical observations of how religions work and by extrapolation will work in historical time."

Ellwood notes that the great traditions emerged in response to the sea change of consciousness and culture that marked the Axial Age, a period beginning around the fifth century B.C.E. and characterized by the advent of urban culture and empire; heightened emphasis on individual salvation and the consequences of free will; the invention of writing; and, through its correlate, recordkeeping, the "discovery” of history that shifted humanity's religious focus from an emphasis on cosmic realms and connections during prehistory to a much greater concern with temporal events.

The first period Ellwood describes is characterized by the appearance of a charismatic founder (Hinduism lacks this aspect) and the development of sacred scripture and organizational structure. The second phase witnesses the co-opting of religion by empire (e.g., Christianity and Rome), and the expansion of religion's political and geographical base, and its doctrinal exaltation into the sphere of the timeless. This period is followed by one of "statues, temples and pageantry" in which religious expression experiences a burgeoning of forms. The fourth, or reformative, stage finds religion asserting its waning power by attempting to "rediscover what its essentials were and press them to the exclusion of all else." During the final stage, Axial religions, as entities in time, die  “in historical time and under exposure to historical awareness," and the cosmic impulse finds primary expression in the quasi-tribal realm of family and community where faith is informed by myth, mysticism, and personal experience. Ellwood writes that this last stage may very well last indefinitely, but he makes no conjectures about a possible sixth stage.

Ellwood contends that Buddhism and the Chinese religions are just now finishing the cycle, Hinduism and Christianity are at the beginning of the final period, and Islam is in the reformative stage.

Writing that during its period of reform a religion experiences deep anxieties about its place in the world and is often inclined "to let right prevail by might," Ellwood asserts that Islam's "bloody borders" may be more convincingly explained by its stage of development than by the charge that it is an inherently violent religion. It should be stressed that Ellwood does not intend his framework to apply to religions in general, but only to those that came of age under a particular set of historical circumstances (Zoroastrianism was on course to join their ranks until it was overcome by the Islamic conquest of Persia; also, Ellwood writes, that "Judaism always seems to be the exception to every rule."). He notes that the modern world is so radically different from the preceding age that any new world religion would likely be unrecognizable according to our present definitions.

-PAUL WINE

March/April 2005

The Song of Songs: A Spiritual Commentary

By M. Basil Pennington
 OCSO, Woodstock, VT: SkyLight Paths Publishing, 2004, Hardcover, 136 pages.

The Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon, is a unique book in the biblical canon. More than one reader has wondered how a powerfully erotic poem made its way into the Bible. In conventional religious circles, it is often left aside, lest some Sunday school teacher have to confront verses like: "Oh, give me the kisses of your mouth, for your love is more delightful than wine," (1:2) or, "Your breasts are like twin fawns, the young of a gazelle, among the lilies.'.' (4:6)

Despite the embarrassment it causes to those of a puritanical nature, the Song of Songs has given rise to something approaching a Jewish/Christian Tantra, an erotic mysticism of the union of the soul (and/or the spiritual community) with the Divine Lover. This path was nowhere more powerfully explicated than in the commentary on the Song of Songs begun in 1135 by Cistercian monk Bernard of Clairvaux, continued by Gilbert of Hoyland, and finally completed in 1214 by John of Ford.

Basil Pennington is a contemporary Cistercian monk and a present-day heir to the mysticism of the Song of Songs. He is best known as one of the founders of the Centering Prayer movement, which has carried contemplative practice out of the monastery and into the world. In this latest book, we join Father Basil as he muses and meditates on the potent, earthy images of the Song, often drawing on the works of his Cistercian forebears. It is a book meant for slow pondering. As Father Basil points out in his introduction, it is not an academic commentary but a "sharing of some of what this celebration of love has evoked in the soul of an artist and a contemplative, a layman and a monk, a Jew and a Christian."

As this prior quote indicates, Father Basil has a collaborator in this project-the acclaimed Jewish artist Phillip Ratner, whose evocative illustrations lend additional depth to the text. Ratner also contributed a short afterword, in which he draws connections between the Song and "the sacred, spiritual, and sensual awareness of human love in a covenant relationship," through his own marriage. This is a vital dimension that we could not expect Father Basil, as a celibate monk, to address as fully.

Gilbert of Hoyland instructed his readers: "Write wisdom on the breadth of your heart. For the heart is broad that is not shriveled by cares." Father Basil invites us to share this breadth of heart, filled with a blazing passion in which our petty cares are consumed, that we may know the ecstasy of union.

-JOHN PLUMMER

March/April 2005

Limitless Mind

By Russell Targ
Novato, CA: New World Library. 2004, Paperback, xxix +209pages.

Retrocausality. Prestimulus response. Retrocognitive dreams. These are some of the exciting new psychic abilities currently explored in the field of remote viewing, discussed in Russell Targ's book, Limitless Mind.

Targ begins by presenting the history of remote viewing, which dates back to 1972; experiments were funded by the CIA and other government organizations but conducted by the Stanford Research Institute. In the classic remote viewing experiment, a remote viewer and an interviewer remain in one location while a second interviewer goes to a location unknown to the other two. After fifteen minutes, the remote viewer attempts to describe or sketch prominent features of the second interviewer's location. The second interviewer then returns to the laboratory, and the remote viewer's responses are analyzed for accuracy.

How does remote viewing work? Does the viewer have an out-of-body experience (OBE) and follow the second interviewer to the secret location? Does the viewer read the second interviewer's mind using telepathy? Or does the viewer have the ability to skip ahead in time, clairvoyantly, and discover the true location? No one knows.

The second part of Limitless Mind describes various forms of precognition that are presently in the forefront of remote, viewing study. Retrocausality, for example, is the ability to change the past or present after perceiving a possible future event. An example of this would be dreaming of being in an automobile accident as a result of a faulty component in your car, then the next day bringing your car to a mechanic and discovering a problem with the car that, if not fixed, could have led to an accident. Some, thing you became aware of in your future has led you to change the present. Targ also explains prestimulus response, an effect that occurs when a subject is given mild electrical shocks at random and develops the reflexive ability to anticipate the shock three seconds before it is administered. In precognitive dreams, a person dreams that a future event can or will take place, and retrocognitive dreams occur when a person dreams about something that happened to someone else a few days prior, but with, out knowing that it happened.

In the final part of the book, Targ deals with psychic healing. One of the more astounding discoveries currently under study is that a psychic healer can often go back in time to ward off or ameliorate a patient's malady. Limitless Mind is a fascinating book and definitely worth reading if you are interested in the powers and capacities of the mind.

-JACK MACKAY

March/April 2005

The Golden Age of Zen: Zen Masters of the Tang Dynasty

By John C. H. Wu
Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom, 2004.Soltcover, 280 pages.

This reprint of The Golden Age of Zen, a modern classic of Zen studies originally published in 1967, will be welcomed by many on the spiritual path. John C. H. Wu (1899-1986) was one of the most extraordinary Chinese of his generation. Statesman, academic, translator, interpreter of Chinese culture, and above all a pilgrim on the path, he experienced both inner and outer worlds. both past and present, to a remarkable degree. In China he served as judge and law school dean and was principal writer of the Nationalist Chinese constitution, all during China's terrible years of war and revolution. Later, dividing his time between Taiwan and the United States, he taught at Seton Hall University and wrote extensively on Chinese culture. He became a Roman Catholic shortly before the age of forty and served as Chinese minister to the Vatican in 1947-48.

His Christianity, however, was not mere dogmatism. Rather, it served as a vehicle for the generous and mutually enriching exchange between Eastern and Western spirituality that was his most influential vocation of all. He translated the Psalms and New Testament into Chinese (using Tao for Logos, or Word, in John's gospel) and the Tao Te Ching into English. He was a great friend of the no less ecumenical Trappist Thomas Merton, and of that supreme apostle of Zen to the West, D. T. Suzuki. The present volume is enhanced with a preface by Merton and the correspondence between Wu and Suzuki.

The Golden Age of Zen concerns the Zen masters of the Tang period (618-906 C.E.). Then Zen, or Chan, was fresh, exciting, and innovative. It was both countercultural and cultural, the former in its spiritually iconoclastic mood and in the willingness of its monks to work with their hands and endure relative poverty, unlike others content to live very well from endowments; and it was culturally assimilative because of its radical commingling of Taoism and Buddhism to create a remarkably new, but very Chinese, kind of Buddhism.

Wu's golden age was the era of the celebrated stories of students suddenly enlightened when told to wash their dishes after eating or upon a teacher's unexpected shout or blow. At the same time, Zen thinkers like Huineng and Huang-po developed subtle philosophical positions based on the One Mind or original unstained nature, the Buddha-nature, in all beings-though always with the caveat that it is not through words and concepts that it is known, but when it is seen as, say, the cypress tree in the front yard, or in the pain of one's nose after a master has twisted it.

This world is wonderfully captured in John Wu’s book, which is at the same time a tribute to a splendid modern master who entered, among other gates, the gateless gate of Zen. Highly recommended.

-ROBERT ELLWOOD

January/February 2005