Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

For six years he listened to what other sages had to say, but it was not until he put himself into a trance one night that his world was changed. ‘The whole cosmos rejoiced, the earth rocked, flowers fell from heaven, fragrant breezes blew and the gods in their various heavens rejoiced . . . There was a new hope of liberation from suffering and the attainment of nirvana, the end of pain. Gautama had become the Buddha, the Enlightened One.’¹¹⁷ Buddha ‘believed’ in the gods that were familiar to him. But he shared with the Israelite prophets the idea that the ultimate reality lay beyond these gods. From his experience of them, or his understanding of them, according to Hinduism, they too were caught up in the vicissitudes of pain and change, in the cycle of birth and rebirth. Instead, Gautama believed that all life was dukkha – suffering, flux – and that dharma, ‘the truth about right living’, brought one to nirvana, the ultimate reality, freedom from pain.¹¹⁸ Buddha’s insight was that, in fact, this state had nothing to do with the gods – it was ‘beyond them’. The state of nirvana was natural to humanity, if people only knew how to look. Gautama claimed not to have ‘invented’ his approach but to have ‘discovered’ it, and therefore other people could too, if they looked within themselves. As with the Israelites in the age of the prophets, the truth lay within. More specifically, the Buddha believed that man’s first step was to realise that something was wrong. In the pagan world this realisation had led to ideas of heaven and paradise, but Buddha’s idea was that we can gain release from dukkha on this earth by ‘living a life of compassion for all living beings, speaking and behaving gently, kindly and accurately and by refraining from anything like drugs or intoxicants that cloud the mind.’¹¹⁹ The Buddha had no conception of heaven. He thought such questions were ‘inappropriate’. He thought that language was ill-equipped to deal with these ideas, that they could only be experienced.

But Buddhism, as we shall see, did develop notions of salvation very similar to Christianity (so similar that early missionaries thought that Buddhism was a counterfeit faith created by the devil). Buddhism developed a concept (and a word, parimucyeran) for being set free from life’s ills, and three names for saviour, Avalokitresvara, Tara and Amitabha, who all belonged to the same family.

The Greeks are generally known for their rationalism, but this tends to obscure the fact that Plato (427–346 BC), one of their greatest thinkers, was also a confirmed mystic. The main influences on him were Socrates, who had questioned the old myths and festivals of the traditional religion, and Pythagoras, who, as we have seen, had decided ideas about the soul, and who, in addition, may have been influenced by ideas from India, by way of Egypt and Persia.

Pythagoras believed that souls were fallen, defiled gods, now imprisoned in the body ‘as in a tomb and doomed to a perpetual cycle of rebirth’.¹²⁰ Pythagoras, and the Orphics, thought that the soul could only be liberated through ritual purification, but Plato went further. To him there was another level of reality, an unchanging realm of the divine, which was beyond the senses. He accepted that the soul was a fallen divinity but believed that it could be liberated and even regain its divine status through his own form of purification – reason. He thought that, in this higher unchanging plane, there were eternal realities – forms or ideas, as he put it – fuller, more permanent and more effective than anything we find on earth, and they could only be fully understood or apprehended in the mind. For Plato there was an ideal form which corresponded to every general idea we have – justice, say, or love. The most important of the forms were Beauty and Good. He didn’t dwell much on god, or the nature of god. The world of the forms was unchanging and static and these forms were not ‘out there’, as the traditional gods were, but could only be found within the self.¹²¹