RLST 303 - Dr. Leona Anderson
October 22, 2004
Essay #2
Buddha Misses Eliade: The Oversight of Theravada Buddha in Eliade’s Theory of Religion
Mircea Eliade is a philosophical theorist that uses phenomenology in understanding religion. This approach is rather complex, with the main Kantian assumption that human beings cannot have direct access to reality because intellectual and physiological constraints give rise to the ‘appearance’ of reality. In other words, reality must be perceived as it presents itself through the sense organs and then interpreted through intellectual representational systems of thought that are familiar to us in order for understanding to occur. Reality itself cannot be known as truth except for how it is presented through our senses and then perceived by the intellect.
Eliade uses this foundation to criticize the techniques of previous scholars who have only presented religions from the ‘outsider perspective’, not allowing a methodological position for the inside context of religious experience itself. By advocating that researchers need to go deep into the cultural context of a religion to discover how the people themselves achieve understanding of Ultimate Reality, Eliade attempts to create a global theory of religion in which others can add to. I believe his attempt is unsympathetic to its own phenomenological foundation and to the systems of religion that do not postulate deities as part of their system. Early Buddhist thought, Theravada, is one such religion who recognizes its founder as Buddha, the man who found the path to achieving nirvana, with the postulation of Buddha as a god forming within the Mahayana construct.
Eliade’s use of the term ‘archaic’ in describing most of the religious perspectives he has studied must be eliminated to truly allow the sense of what Eliade has to offer the field of religious studies; he brought the concept of transcendence through “the Sacred” back into the researchers domain. His definition of religion, as stated by Dr. William Arnal, is the “appreciation for or response to the Sacred, which has supernatural power and cannot be reduced to any (other) mundane phenomenon”. Arnal unpacks Eliade’s concept of the Sacred; “The Sacred is something within the capacity of all human beings to experience, a sense of sublimity or transcendence”(6).
These are the teachings of Buddha and the Theravadic School of Buddhism which is to transcend the profane into the sacred. Through renouncing the profane world, the Sacred can be appreciated through the extended efforts of the initiates in recognizing the sunyata (emptiness) of everyday existence .The philosophies of most Buddhist schools are phenomenological in nature and Theravada is the school that originated after Buddha’s experience of enlightenment and expounded prajnapti-matra –“that things as we conceive of them and talk about them are mere conceptualizations, mere labels” (Gombrich 4). Yet, Eliade himself admits in the introduction of “From Primitives To Zen” that he only studied Japanese Mahayana Buddhist schools of thought (Walz), and even those were only from an arm-chair position and through the use of other scholars. Sometimes he applied Sanskrit terms to many of his generalizations pertaining to Buddhist examples and used resources that seemed to be of the Indian Buddhist school of Theravada – such as Pindola Bharadvaja, an arhat introduced in the Mahayana Pindola Sutta (examples seen in both of Walz’ work). His “in depth research” criterion was never applied to any Buddhist religion and many of Eliade’s predecessors consider Theravada as not being a religion since it posited no deities or ‘gods’, what Eliade calls a theophany; their philosophy was one of a process towards the Sacred.
Using phenomenology, one can cross-culturally research into the various religious practices and manifestations that contact the Sacred, or allow the Sacred to present itself Phenomena such as prayer, myth, and sacrifice, will show the meaning of the Sacred within each of the phenomena. The Sacred would present itself in prayer and prayer then shows one aspect of meaning of the Sacred. The cross-cultural phenomenological approach would then transcend our current understanding of religion and bring us to the ability to fulfill the human capacity to experience the Sacred and thus transcend the function of religion as we know it. This is precisely the requirement Theravadins placed in their religion, yet Eliade only chose the Buddhist schools that supported his global theory.
One such aspect in his global theory is his concept of the systematic extension of symbols of the sacred (Pals, 176). Here Eliade states that a symbol or myth may first be a simple symbol of nature, such as the sun, that then expands into a framework for the Sacred to show meaning into the profane life of the everyday. From this he then ranks symbols by importance based on the character of the symbol and its prominence in various numbers of religions. Theravadins would show the emptiness (Sunyata) of these conceptualizations, thus hindering the theory Eliade is proposing for all religions. The globalization of his theory would be shown to have a glitch. These same grounds of contention would arise over his postulations of sacred places, and times within his theory.
Take for example his theory of “the eternal return” where cosmology always promotes a return to origins. Unfortunately for Eliade, Theravadins have no cosmological myth of origins of the world. If Eliade would have retained his “out of history” concept without anchoring it within origin myths, then Theravadins and other Buddhists would seem to support his theory of wanting to be ‘out of history’. As Pals explains, events of ordinary profane life, the daily round of labor and struggle, are things they (devotees) desperately wish to escape (179). Desperately may be too strong of a word, but Buddhist philosophy starts with the Four Noble Truths and culminates on a path that ends suffering through nirvana, extinction of the mundane world. This could be seen as out of time and out of history. It is not until Mahayana Buddhism that cosmic creation stories are created.
How would Eliade have confronted the Theravadin phenomenological result that, since objects can not be known in their reality, but only by their presentation of reality, then even the intellectualizations and process of religions must be seen for what they are –empty of beingness and only constructions of reality, therefore, by Theravadin standards, must be eventually released? He states that Zen is one of his research cases, yet this school postulates this reality as one furthers as a Zennist. This raises the question on how deep his research actually reaches into the many religions he used in supporting his theory and his career.
The question on Eliade’s intention of desiring a global theory of religion may be one of evolutionizing the various religions into one great religion, but one based in speculation. Eliade does emphasize that the Sacred presents itself in manifest form because no one current form can hold all of the meaning and truth of itself. Eliade avidly critiques reductionalistic theories, yet his desire for a global theory tends to be reductionalistic in its lack of acknowledging evidence that hinders his theory. One man would be hard put to study every religion in the world throughout time and space, but how can Eliade account for including certain later forms of Buddhism that are sourced, both historically through lineage and philosophically through the texts? The predecessors of Eliade can easily rectify their founders errors by simply taking the time and attention necessary to complete a more in depth and contextualized research through the regions of his past research and into new areas of research left undeveloped, especially those of contention against Eliade’ methodological purpose. Or even more simply, they could learn from the Theravadins that all methods and theories are showing reality, but are themselves empty of reality and let go of a globalized theory of religion. It is all a matter of conceptualization, and this point is a great place to begin seeing the value of both phenomenological methods and Theravada methods in action.
References
Arnal, Dr. William. (2004). RLST 300 (Summaries). Unpublished Notes from Winter classes, p6-7.
Eliade, Mircea. (1991). The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton: University Press.
Gombrich, Richard F. (1996). How Buddhism Began: The Conditioned Genesis of the Early Teachings. London: Athlone.
Pals, Daniel L. (1996). Seven Theories of Religion. New York: Oxford University Press.
Walz, Jonathan David. (1996). From Primitives To Zen: A Hypertext Conversion of The Great Reference Work Compiled By Mircea Eliade. http://alexm.here.ru/mirro
(1996). Mircea Eliade. www.angelfire.com/electron
