The Elixir of the Gnostics

<div><figure><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a><source type="image/webp"><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"><img src="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg" width="736" height="669" alt=""></a></source><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a><div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a></div><a href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_!JgU_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1c5bfa6f-6f37-4226-8222-a300506da8a1_736x669.jpeg"></a></figure></div><p>There is a sentence that crossed every threshold the Islamic intellectual tradition ever built. As above, so below. As below, so above. It enters Arabic from Greek in the eighth century, attributed to a figure the translators call Hermes the Thrice-Greatest. It passes from the alchemists to the Sufis. It is cited by Jabir ibn Hayyan in his alchemical corpus. It threads through al-Ghazali, through Ibn Arabi, through the Persian poets. And it arrives, nearly a thousand years after it first entered Arabic, in a short treatise written by a man who had been in retreat for fifteen years in a village outside Qom. The treatise is called <em>Iksir al-’Arifin</em>. The Elixir of the Gnostics. The author was Sadr al-Din Muhammad al-Shirazi, whom the tradition calls Mulla Sadra.</p><p>He wrote it after he had stopped writing for the court. He had been the senior philosophy student of his generation in Safavid Isfahan, trained under Mir Damad and Shaykh Baha’i, and he had taught at the Khan Madrasa under the patronage of Shah Abbas. He had also drawn the attention of the Akhbari ulama — the legalist clerics who could not abide his readings of Ibn Arabi, his treatment of the Light Verse, his refusal to confine philosophy to the rationalist boundaries Shi’i orthodoxy had inherited from Avicenna. Pressure mounted. The sources differ on the exact year. At some point Sadra left Isfahan and walked north into the mountains. He settled in Kahak, a small village about thirty kilometers from Qom. He stayed for roughly fifteen years.</p><div><div><div><p>Spiritualrelief's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div><p>The biographical sources for this period are thin. What is known is that he fasted, kept vigil, made dhikr, and wrote nothing. When he came back, he came back as a different writer. The <em>Asfar</em>, his nine-volume work on the four spiritual journeys of the intellect, dates from after Kahak. So does the <em>Mafatih al-Ghayb</em>, his Qur’anic hermeneutics. So does <em>Iksir al-’Arifin</em>, which he addressed to seekers rather than to the seminary.</p><p>He took the framework for the <em>Iksir</em> from a Persian writer four centuries dead. Baba Afdal Kashani — Afdal al-Din — was a thirteenth-century gnostic from the Maragha region whose <em>Jawidan-nama</em>, the <em>Book of the Everlasting</em>, had circulated in small Sufi-philosophical circles in Iran and almost nowhere else. Sadra took its four-part architecture, removed roughly forty percent of the original, expanded the remainder by half its length again, and rendered the whole into Arabic. Where Kashani had written in the Persian style of the early Mongol period, Sadra wrote in the Arabic style of late Safavid philosophy. Where Kashani had cited the Qur’an sparingly, Sadra wove some two hundred Qur’anic citations through eighty-seven pages.</p><p>He gave the new work a title that placed it in a different lineage altogether.</p><blockquote><p>The Elixir of the Gnostics.</p></blockquote><p>The lineage was alchemy. The Greek word for the philosopher’s stone in Latinate dress became the Arabic <em>al-iksir</em> — the substance that completes the transmutation. Jabir ibn Hayyan, the eighth-century Shi’i alchemist whose corpus shaped every alchemical writer who came after him, had taught that the greatest elixir was not extracted from metals. The greatest elixir, <em>al-iksir al-akbar</em>, was the perfected human. <em>Al-insan al-kamil</em>. The work was on the self.</p><p>Five hundred years later, al-Ghazali wrote <em>Kimya-yi Sa’adat</em>, <em>The Alchemy of Happiness</em>, in Persian for ordinary readers, after his own eleven-year retreat. He used the alchemy metaphor without apology. The heart is iron; the disciplines are abrasives; the polished heart reflects the divine light. <em>The aim of moral discipline</em>, Ghazali wrote, <em>is to purify the heart from the rust of passion and resentment till like a clear mirror, it reflects the light of God</em>.</p><p>Five centuries after Ghazali, Sadra returned to the metaphor in Arabic. He titled his text <em>The Elixir of the Gnostics</em>. Then he proceeded for eighty-seven pages without ever mentioning alchemy again. He did not need to. The text was performing what the title named.</p><div><hr></div><h2>What Is Being Worked</h2><p>The <em>Iksir</em> opens with the question of knowledge. Five chapters on what knowing actually is, divided into a hierarchy that Sadra inherits from the Persian philosophical tradition and reworks for his own purposes. There is the science of words. There is the science of practices. There is the science of thoughts. And there is the science of the afterworld.</p><p>The first three are real. Sadra is no enemy of grammar, jurisprudence, or theology. He had taught grammar at the Khan Madrasa. He had written on logic. The science of words helps the soul communicate. The science of practices helps the soul live correctly in a community. The science of thoughts helps the soul reason. All three are useful. None of them transforms the soul.</p><p>The science of the afterworld does.</p><p>What Sadra means by the afterworld is not what the legalist tradition meant. The legalists meant the place of reward and punishment, the resurrection at the end of time, the books opened and the deeds weighed. Sadra meant something else. The afterworld is the world the soul is already constructing for itself with every act of attention. The afterworld is the place the soul will subsist in when the body fails, and that place is being made now, by what the soul knows.</p><p>This is where Sadra reaches back to his teacher’s teacher, Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, who had distinguished two kinds of knowledge in twelfth-century Aleppo before being executed at the age of thirty-eight for the views in his <em>Hikmat al-Ishraq</em>. Suhrawardi called the first kind <em>al-’ilm al-husuli</em> — acquired knowledge, the kind that arrives by mediation, through concepts, through the senses, through inference. He called the second <em>al-’ilm al-huduri</em> — presential knowledge, the kind that arrives by the knower’s being-with the known. You know the meaning of pain by feeling it. You know the meaning of your own existence by existing. You cannot mistake presential knowledge because there is no distance in it for error to creep into.</p><p>Sadra takes Suhrawardi’s distinction and presses it further. All true knowing, he argues, is presential. The acquired kind is preparatory. The soul concepts its way toward the threshold and then, when it crosses, knows by becoming.</p><blockquote><p>And He taught Adam the names, all of them.</p></blockquote><h6><em>— Qur’an 2:31</em></h6><p>The first thing taught to the first human was names. Not facts about things — names. The names of the things and the names of God. To know a name in the Qur’anic sense is not to label. It is to participate. Adam knew the names because the names had been spoken into him. He was their first vessel.</p><p>The hierarchy of sciences in the <em>Iksir</em> ends where Adam began. The highest knowing is the knowing that transforms the knower. The vessel that knows the names becomes the place where the names speak themselves.</p><div><hr></div><h2>The Vessel</h2><p>The second part of the <em>Iksir</em> is the longest. Ten chapters on the soul as a receptacle for the sciences. Why she is impeded. What knowledge is necessary. The Adamic tablet. The divine vicegerency. The world of Sovereignty. The book of the soul. The structure of these chapters is the structure of the work itself, because the soul is what the work is on.</p><p>Sadra opens with the impediment. The soul does not start out clear. She arrives in the world clouded, accustomed to the senses, captured by what is nearest. She mistakes the appetites for herself. She mistakes the body for her home. The Sufi tradition before Sadra had a thousand images for this state — the cage, the prison, the dust on the mirror, the iron that has forgotten it was made to reflect. Sadra adds none of these. He moves instead to the question of why.</p><p>The Qur’an gives him the answer.</p><blockquote><p>We did indeed offer the Trust to the heavens, the earth, and the mountains. They refused to undertake it, being afraid thereof. But man undertook it. He was indeed unjust and ignorant.</p></blockquote><h6><em>— Qur’an 33:72</em></h6><p>The Trust — <em>al-amana</em>. The classical commentators offered several readings of what the Trust is. Sadra reads it as the capacity to be a vessel for the divine names. The mountains refused because to bear the names is to be undone by them. Man accepted because he did not yet know what he was accepting. Sadra does not soften the verse’s verdict — <em>zaluman jahulan</em>, unjust and ignorant. The acceptance was made in ignorance of the cost. But the acceptance is what the work is on. The soul that accepted the Trust is the soul that must now learn what it accepted.</p><p>This learning happens through what Sadra calls <em>al-khilafa</em> — the vicegerency. The chapters of Part Two cluster around this concept like iron filings around a magnet. The human soul is a <em>khalifa</em>, a deputy, the place where the divine names are made visible in the world. The verse Sadra returns to is the one in which God announces his intention before the angels:</p><blockquote><p>Verily, I am about to place a vicegerent on the earth.</p></blockquote><h6><em>— Qur’an 2:30</em></h6><p>The angels object. The earth, they say, will be filled with corruption and bloodshed. The reply they receive is short. <em>I know what you know not</em>. Then God teaches Adam the names. The angels are commanded to prostrate to Adam, who knows what they do not know.</p><p>The doctrine of the vicegerency is older than Sadra and older than Ibn Arabi, but it is in the Akbarian school — the school of Ibn Arabi — that it acquires the metaphysical weight Sadra inherits. The perfect human is the <em>barzakh</em>, the isthmus, the meeting place of the unseen and the seen. The names of God do not manifest themselves directly in the cosmos. They manifest through the vessel that can hold them. That vessel is the human soul that has been polished to receive what it was made to receive.</p><p>This is the structural claim that connects Sadra to a much older line. The Egyptians at Memphis had taught that the god Ptah created by speaking, that the heart conceived and the tongue uttered, and that what was uttered came into being. The Greeks at Alexandria translated this into a doctrine of <em>Logos</em> — the divine speech that mediates between the One and the world. The Hermetic corpus that traveled into Arabic in the eighth century carried the doctrine forward. Jabir ibn Hayyan worked with it. Ibn Arabi reworked it as the doctrine of divine names manifesting through <em>al-insan al-kamil</em>. Sadra inherited it through the Akbarian school and grounded it in his own metaphysics of being.</p><p>The metaphysics is what makes Sadra Sadra. The Avicennan tradition had treated existence as a kind of accident attaching to essences. A horse is a horse first, and then it exists or does not. Sadra reversed the order. Existence is the only reality. Essences are modifications of existence. Everything that is, is being — in some grade, at some intensity. The whole cosmos is a hierarchy of intensities of one thing.</p><p>Which means that when the soul knows something, the soul does not represent it. The soul becomes, at some grade, what it knows. Knowledge is being. The knower and the known share an existence; the act of knowing is the act of sharing that existence more completely.</p><p>This is the philosophical statement of what Memphis had said, what Hermes had said, what Ibn Arabi had said. The vessel that knows the divine name becomes the place where the name knows itself.</p><p>The elixir is doing its work.</p><div><hr></div><h2>Solve</h2><p>The third part of the <em>Iksir</em> turns to origins. Why is the soul in matter at all. Why must the vessel be broken before it is mended. Why is the work necessary.</p><p>Sadra walks through time, place, the beginnings of human existence, the prostration of the angels to Adam, and then, in three of the most striking chapters in the treatise, the question of Iblis.</p><p>Iblis refused to prostrate. The Qur’an names his refusal four times. He was commanded with the angels; he stood apart; he gave a reason — <em>I am better than him; Thou hast created me of fire, and him of clay</em>. The legalist tradition read this as the first sin and the origin of evil. Sadra reads it differently.</p><p>In Sadra’s account, Iblis is not an accident of the cosmos. Iblis is part of the wisdom by which the cosmos is constructed. The soul that descends into matter requires resistance to do its work. A vessel polished without friction cannot reflect, because there is no friction. A soul that meets no opposition cannot rise, because there is nothing to rise from. Iblis is the friction. He is the principle of refusal that the soul must learn to refuse in itself.</p><p>Sadra is careful here. He is not exonerating Iblis. He is showing that the existence of refusal is part of the divine wisdom — that the cosmos in which there is descent and ascent is a cosmos in which there must also be the principle of standing apart. The soul does not become a <em>khalifa</em> by being given the title. The soul becomes a <em>khalifa</em> by enduring what threatens to make it less than one.</p><p>The chapters on Iblis are followed by chapters on the angel’s inspiration and the satan’s disquieting. Every human soul, Sadra writes, lives in a field of two voices. One voice draws upward, toward the names. The other voice draws downward, toward the appetites. The work is to learn to distinguish them. The work is to align the soul’s own voice with the first.</p><p>What makes this work possible is what Sadra calls <em>al-haraka al-jawhariyya</em> — substantial motion. The doctrine is one of his signatures, and it appears in the <em>Iksir</em> in a compressed form. The Avicennan tradition had taught that the soul, once created, was a fixed essence. It might acquire perfections, but it remained what it was. Sadra denied the fixity. The soul, he argued, is in continual motion at the level of its substance. With every act of knowing, with every act of choosing, the soul is becoming. Its being shifts. Its intensity rises or falls. There is no still soul. There is only a soul that is rising or a soul that is sinking.</p><p>This is what the descent is for. The soul that begins in matter is compressed by it. The compression is a kind of pressure that forces the soul to use what is in it. Without the compression, the soul would never have to become anything; it would float in its undifferentiated potential forever. With the compression, the soul is forced to choose, forced to know, forced to move.</p><p>The image Sadra returns to is the womb. The soul in the womb is compressed by the body that is forming around it. The compression is the precondition of birth. Without the womb, the body could not take shape. Without the body, the soul could not be born into the world.</p><p>The same structure, Sadra argues, repeats at death. The soul has been compressed in the body for a lifetime. The body fails. The soul is expelled into the next world — born again, into a state made by what it has spent its life knowing.</p><p>The descent is the work. <em>Solve.</em> Dissolve the soul into matter so that it will have something to be drawn out of.</p><div><hr></div><h2>Coagula</h2><p>The fourth part of the <em>Iksir</em> is the part that gives the work its alchemical shape. Ten chapters on the ends. The highest knowledge. The final end. The soul’s imprisonment. Divine solicitude. The roots of felicity and wretchedness. The quiddity of death. The meaning of forgiveness. The soul’s subsistence. And a final chapter on the interrelation of the three parts of the treatise.</p><p>This is where Sadra’s substantial motion meets his eschatology. The soul that has been moving for a lifetime arrives at death already what it has made of itself. The grave is not a courtroom in which a verdict is pronounced from outside. The grave is the soul opening its eyes inside the state it has been building.</p><p>The Qur’an gives him the verse he needs.</p><blockquote><p>Thou wast heedless of this. Now We have removed from thee thy covering, and thy sight today is piercing.</p></blockquote><h6><em>— Qur’an 50:22</em></h6><p>The covering is not a veil over reality. The covering is the inattention of the soul to what it was doing while it was alive. The piercing sight is not a new faculty given at death. The piercing sight is the soul finally seeing what it has been all along.</p><p>Sadra calls the soul’s final state <em>sa’ada</em> — felicity. The word carries the Aristotelian inheritance of <em>eudaimonia</em> and the Qur’anic inheritance of <em>sa’id</em>, the blessed one. But Sadra means something specific. Felicity is not pleasure. Felicity is the soul subsisting in what it has loved. The dhakir who has spent her life in remembrance becomes remembrance. The contemplative who has spent his life in <em>fikr</em> becomes contemplation. The miser who has spent his life in his accounts subsists, after death, in the state of accounting. Each receives what they have made.</p><p>This doctrine is harder than it sounds. The legalist tradition could promise paradise as a reward and hell as a punishment, both administered from outside. Sadra’s account requires no administration. The soul administers itself. The soul has been administering itself the whole time. Death simply removes the body that was concealing what the soul was doing.</p><p>The chapter on forgiveness is short and weighted. Forgiveness, in Sadra’s reading, is not the cancellation of a debt. Forgiveness is the divine solicitude that makes possible the soul’s return to its origin even when the soul has wandered far from it. There is a current in the cosmos that runs back toward the source. The soul that does not actively oppose that current will be carried by it. Forgiveness is the name for the current. It is what the cosmos is doing, all the time, in favor of the soul that does not refuse.</p><p>The closing chapters bring the soul into its subsistence — <em>al-baqa</em>. The Sufi technical vocabulary is being used carefully. The soul has been <em>fana</em>, annihilated, in the sense that what it had been at the start has been undone. What subsists is what the soul has become through the work. The vessel has been broken; the vessel has been remade; what is left is the elixir.</p><p><em>Coagula.</em> The dissolved matter takes its final shape.</p><p>The transmutation is complete.</p><div><hr></div><h2>The Hidden Treasure</h2><p>There is a saying that the Sufi tradition has carried for as long as it has been a tradition. It is not in the Qur’an. It is not in the canonical hadith collections. The transmitters call it <em>hadith qudsi</em> — a sacred saying — and Ibn Arabi was already quoting it as old by the early thirteenth century.</p><blockquote><p>I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known, so I created the creation, that I might be known.</p></blockquote><h6><em>— Hadith Qudsi, transmitted in the Akbarian tradition</em></h6><p>The saying gives the <em>Iksir</em> its frame. The cosmos exists because the One sought to be known. The vessel that comes into being in the cosmos is the place where the knowing happens. The work of polishing the vessel is the work of completing the knowing. The elixir that the gnostic becomes is the medium through which the hidden treasure is uncovered.</p><p>Hermes had said it in different words. The Memphite priests had said it in different words. Jabir had said it. Ghazali had said it. Ibn Arabi had said it. Sadra said it in the metaphysics of his own century — that existence is one, that the soul rises through the grades of existence by what it knows, that the soul’s knowing IS its being, and that the perfected soul is the place where being knows itself.</p><p>The treatise ends without spectacle. There is no ecstatic close, no rhetorical climax. The last chapter is on the interrelation of the three parts. Sadra is doing what he has done throughout the <em>Iksir</em>. He is showing the structure of the work and trusting the reader to walk it.</p><p>The work is not on metals. The work is on the self. The elixir is not extracted from substance. The elixir is the substance that the gnostic, through the long alchemy of attention, has himself become.</p><p>He who knows himself knows his Lord.</p><p>The hidden treasure has found its mirror.</p><div><hr></div><h6><em>Mulla Sadra, Iksir al-’Arifin (The Elixir of the Gnostics), composed in Arabic in the early seventeenth century. The standard English translation is by William C. Chittick, parallel Arabic-English, Brigham Young University Press, Islamic Translation Series, 2003. The Persian source-text adapted by Sadra is Afdal al-Din Kashani’s Jawidan-nama, translated by Chittick in The Heart of Islamic Philosophy, Oxford, 2001. For Sadra’s larger system, see al-Hikma al-Muta’aliya fi’l-Asfar al-’Aqliyya al-Arba’a, with vols. 8 and 9 translated by Latimah-Parvin Peerwani as Spiritual Psychology, ICAS Press, 2008.</em></h6><div><div><div><p>Spiritualrelief's Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.</p></div><div><div></div><div></div></div></div></div> <p><a href="https://spiritualrelief.substack.com/p/the-elixir-of-the-gnostics" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/f1mRvU2 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

#guessthesong! Can you recognize this #symphony by its ending?

<p><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" width="640" height="390" src="https://www.inoreader.com/yt-embed/?v=8t2wTTXpu6I" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" style="width:100%;aspect-ratio:16/9;height:auto;display:block;border:0;" frameborder="0"></iframe></p><p>You may be familiar with the opening of this symphony, but can you recognize it by its ending? It is performed by the Budapest Festival Orchestra, under the baton of Iván Fischer. Have you heard the symphony before, and can you tell us who composed it and what it’s called? You’ll find out the answer on Friday on this channel. Good luck! <br> <br> Here are four more #guesthesong-by-its-ending-videos: <br> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yphGbzzCgV0">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/yphGbzzCgV0</a><br> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RRNkEXpNrrw">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RRNkEXpNrrw</a><br> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hJUiiIlRDD0">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/hJUiiIlRDD0</a><br> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tiptEAiR8w4">https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tiptEAiR8w4</a><br> <br> And please subscribe to DW Classical Music: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/dwclassicalmusic">https://www.youtube.com/dwclassicalmusic</a><br> <br> #guessthesong #songquiz #songcontest #shortsvideo #shortsyoutube #shortsyoutubevideo #shorts #shortvideo #shortvideos #shortfeed #classicalmusic #shortsyoutube #quiz #quiztime #symphony</p> <p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8t2wTTXpu6I" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/f1mRvU2 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

Los silencios de María

<p><br></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:right;"><i><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:verdana;">Memoria de Santa María, Madre de la Iglesia</span></span></i></p> <br><table style="margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align:center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheQ-TkPOZ445clL5Y_dTuoI8KuHDghnx6bUdzB_gpu0wvcghYhwxH5Y0NNtwxXhFwr07BSasSRcELUAi1sOaYiwdGB4Khz4pWX1ePTVWuGHuR7-rLQvYy_zCtVpGsjyqUH_9RNsNGQ-_NJWA4GDFB6rgj9YSXIiB1ZGp8ptcUUxyk11NvtVdqRbdURqVjj/s586/Odigitriya_Smolenskaya_Dionisiy_1482.jpg" style="margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;text-align:center;"><img height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEheQ-TkPOZ445clL5Y_dTuoI8KuHDghnx6bUdzB_gpu0wvcghYhwxH5Y0NNtwxXhFwr07BSasSRcELUAi1sOaYiwdGB4Khz4pWX1ePTVWuGHuR7-rLQvYy_zCtVpGsjyqUH_9RNsNGQ-_NJWA4GDFB6rgj9YSXIiB1ZGp8ptcUUxyk11NvtVdqRbdURqVjj/w273-h320/Odigitriya_Smolenskaya_Dionisiy_1482.jpg" width="273" alt="Odigitriya_Smolenskaya_Dionisiy_1482.jpg"></a></td></tr><tr><td style="text-align:center;"><b>Odigitriya</b>,<br><i>Dionís Smolensk</i> (1482)</td></tr></tbody></table><br><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">Quizás me influyen las intuiciones del psicoanálisis, aunque en un sentido antimoderno. A través de ellas no encuentro solamente una explicación más o menos discutible del funcionamiento de nuestro aparato psíquico. Descubro igualmente una posibilidad de liberarnos de sus mecanismos, aun a pesar suyo. Gracias a la dimensión espiritual que, grabada en él, lo atraviesa, además de sanar nuestras heridas, las podemos trascender sin negarlas. Nos obliga a enfrentarnos con nuestra condición de hijos y, por tanto, de formar <i>familia</i> y no tan sólo de formar <i>parte de</i> una familia.</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">Como es sabido, Freud convierte la figura del padre en la clave de bóveda de su teoría psicológica. Como una boutade, podría invertirse la cita atribuida a Camus asegurando que el psicoanálisis justifica que «contra mi padre, con razón o sin ella». Si el autor de <i>El hombre rebelde</i> elegía a su madre frente a la justicia, parecería que la justicia nos obliga a deshacernos de nuestro padre. Es un proceso doloroso, pero imprescindible para madurar. Ahora bien, si se puede matar al padre, ¿es posible soportar la culpa de Orestes de <i>matar a la madre</i>? </span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">Desde <i>Poética del monasterio</i> percibo cada vez con más claridad que el objetivo último del proceso revolucionario moderno no es la destrucción del padre. Su figura debe aniquilarse no por ella misma, sino en cuanto representa el último bastión frente al asalto a la ciudadela de la maternidad que ya ha comenzado en un nivel político, social y tecnocientífico. La maternidad constituye nuestro fundamento antropológico último, el que nos conecta directamente con la esperanza del Edén. Suprimida y sustituida su función de cuidado no sólo material y moral sino sobre todo escatológica, la hostilidad entre la serpiente y la mujer de la que habla el Génesis (Gn 3,15) dará paso al triunfo provisional del Anticristo, mientras ella huye al desierto (Ap 12,6).</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">***</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">La mariología, como rama teológica que estudia sistemáticamente el papel de la Virgen María en la historia de la salvación, no sólo es decisiva en términos dogmáticos desde el Concilio de Éfeso (431), cuando fue proclamada Madre de Dios además de Madre de Cristo. Frente a Yocasta y Clitemnestra y más allá de Sara, madre de Isaac, María nos enfrenta tanto con los límites de nuestra fe como con los de nuestra naturaleza. </span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">En términos lacanianos, Massimo Recalcati ha podido subrayar en unas páginas bellísimas de <i>Las manos de la madre</i> resaltar la profunda verdad psicológica de la maternidad de la virgen de Nazaret. Pero María nos interroga también muy profundamente sobre nuestros sentimientos de filiación, como varones y mujeres, con nuestras madres: las fantasías y los temores, las ansiedades y los deseos que nos unen a a ellas desde el origen mismo de nuestra existencia. </span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">Por eso, en no pocas ocasiones hablar de la “Madre de Dios y madre nuestra” resulta tan difícil a causa de las agresividades latentes que desencadena mencionar el nombre materno. Cualquier reserva sobre los títulos que pretenden honrarla suscita la indignación de muchos. Cualquier veneración exclusiva de su santidad – la famosa <i>hiperdulía</i> – provoca el escándalo o, a lo sumo, la condescendencia de otros. Las acusaciones cargadas de resentimiento de <i>herejía</i> o de <i>idolatría</i> se refieren mucho más a nuestras expectativas como hijos que a la realidad maternal de la Virgen María. </span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">Criatura perfecta, primicia de la Nueva Creación inaugurada por la Resurrección de su Hijo Jesucristo, Reina de los cielos, ante ella se inclinan las legiones todas de los ángeles. Como reproduce la oración mariana por antonomasia, corresponde al Arcángel Gabriel transmitirnos las primeras palabras que Dios le dirigió recogidas en el Evangelio. El original griego posee una fuerza extraordinaria que el latín se esfuerza por capturar: χαîρε, κεχαριτωμένη (Lc 1,28). La gracia de la que está llena María viene contenida en la explosión exclamativa del saludo. En el «alégrate», en el «regocíjate» brilla con toda intensidad la gracia del Señor en Ella. </span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">Querría honrarla deteniéndome en sus silencios.</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">***</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">La voz de María resuena con especial intensidad en el evangelio de la infancia de Lucas. En tres ocasiones la Virgen habla: en la Anunciación con Gabriel; al visitar a su prima Isabel<i>;</i> y al reencontrar a su hijo Jesús en el Templo. «Fiat Verbum tuum» (Lc 1,8); «Magnificat anima mea» (Lc 1,46), «Fili, quid fecisti nobis sic?» (Lc 2,48). María cumple así el triple oficio de todo bautizado: sacerdotal, profético y real. Se ofrece como el altar de la Nueva Creación en la Encarnación. Profetiza la Redención haciendo uso del <i>adynaton</i>, la figura retórica por excelencia de los libros proféticos. El himno del <i>Magnificat</i> eleva a María por encima de los más altos profetas del Antiguo Testamento, como Isaías o Miriam, la hermana de Moisés. Por último, ejerce en la obediencia el poder conferido por Dios de gobernar a su Hijo, el cual se le somete anticipándole su Resurrección, pues, perdido, fue encontrado en medio del Templo enseñando.</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">Tres veces calla también en este evangelio de la infancia: ante los pastores que vienen a adorar al Niño; ante las profecías de Simeón y Ana tras la Presentación; ante la respuesta de su Hijo recuperado en Jerusalén. </span></span></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">Lo silencios de María son la escuela de la oración cristiana. Si Cristo, «aun siendo Hijo, aprendió, sufriendo, a obedecer» (Heb 5,8), también María, siendo Madre, aprendió, sufriendo, a obedecer. ¿A qué aprendió? A ir desprendiéndose de su Hijo, a ofrecerlo como Hostia santa a la comunidad de sus discípulos. Era así como, desde el principio, «Jesús iba creciendo en edad, sabiduría y gracia ante Dios y ante los hombres» (Lc 2,52).</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">Desde el Nacimiento los silencios tallan el corazón de María como el sagrario donde meditar la vida de Jesús. En la traducción de la Vulgata casi se repite en idénticos términos su actitud: «Maria conservabat omnia verba (haec conferens) in corde suo» (Lc 2,19.51). El original griego introduce, sin embargo, unos matices preci(o)sos. Tras la visita de los pastores, María «atesoraba» (συνετήρει) estas «palabras» —no simplemente estas «cosas», estos «acontecimientos»<i>—</i> «meditadas» o «recogidas» (συμβάλλουσα) en su corazón. Al volver de Jerusalén, las «guardaba» (διετήρει). </span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">***</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">Durante la vida pública de Jesús la presencia de María desaparece prácticamente de la escena tras su participación decisiva en la boda de Canaá (Jn 2,3-5). En los sinópticos apenas se la menciona en un par de ocasiones mas. Muchos exegetas han intentado interpretado estos pasajes bajo la presión del tabú inconsciente, y por tanto ambivalente, del «amor de madre» («con razón o sin ella», «a una madre un buen hijo no le da disgustos», etc.). </span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">En ambos casos, tanto como respuesta a la mujer que declara dichosos el vientre que lo llevó y los pechos que lo amamantaron (Lc 11,27) como frente al aviso de que su madre y sus hermanos lo buscan (Lc 8,19), Jesús aprovecha para insistir en una de sus enseñanzas más radicales: el concepto de <i>familia</i> se sitúa en un nuevo plano que desafía tanto nuestras concepciones de la familia <i>natural</i> como de la <i>religiosa</i>. No son los vínculos según la <i>carne</i>, que engloban tanto lo biológico como lo moral y lo psicológico, sino según el <i>espíritu</i> los que determinan entonces la pertenencia a la <i>ecclesia</i> como Cuerpo místico de Cristo. Es la de Jesús una predicación tan provocadora que «los de su alrededor» (οί παρ’ αύτοû) <i>—</i>no exactamente «su familia», como suele traducirse<i>—</i> salieron a buscarlo porque «decían que estaba fuera de sí» (Mc 3,21).</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;"> ***</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">La pedagogía de la maternidad de María se completa al pie de la Cruz. Normalmente se interpreta que Jesús, a punto de expirar, se ocupa de que su madre no se quede sola, entregándola al cuidado del discípulo amado. Medito el pasaje y creo que sucede al contrario. A punto de entregarse en manos del Padre, Jesús pide a su Madre un último de acto de fe. Ante el abismo insondable de la muerte, Jesús le encomienda la plenitud de su maternidad: cuidar de su Iglesia representada por aquel discípulo. Por eso, desde aquella hora este se apresuró a recibirla como algo suyo (Jn 19,27). Sin Ella, ¿cómo podría perseverar unánime en la oración? (Hchs 1,14). Con su silencio final, desprendida ya de todo, vaciada de sí hasta el extremo, María engendró nuestra fe en la Resurrección.¿Acaso, durante el Sábado Santo, no fue meditando en su corazón la palabra definitiva por llegar: Χαίρετε (Mt. 28,9)?</span></span></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">***</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;"></span></span></p><blockquote><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">«<i>Fue, pues, la bienaventurada Virgen María fuerte en el propósito, templada en el silencio, prudente en la interrogación, justa en la confesión. Por tanto, con estas cuatro columnas y las tres de la fe trinitaria construyó en ella la Sabiduría celestial una casa para sí. […] También nosotros, si queremos ser hechos casa de esta sabiduría, debemos tallar en nosotros las mismas siete columnas, esto es, nos debemos preparar para ella con la fe y las costumbres.</i>» </span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">(S. Bernardo de Claraval, <i>Sermón sobre la Casa de la Divina Sabiduría, que es la Virgen María</i>).</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;"> </span></span></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">«<i>En ti misericordia, en ti clemencia, </i></span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><i><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">en ti magnificencia, en ti se aduna </span></span></i></p><p><i></i></p><i></i><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;"><i><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;">cuánta bondad sumó la humana herencia.</span></i><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;">»</span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">(Dante, <i>Divina Comedia</i>, Par. XXXIII, 19-21)</span></span></p></blockquote><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;"></span></span></p><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;"> </span></span></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:justify;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"></span></p><div style="clear:both;text-align:center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" height="266" src="https://www.inoreader.com/yt-embed/?v=eASOZw5p1O8" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" style="width:100%;aspect-ratio:16/9;height:auto;display:block;border:0;" width="320"></iframe></div><br><span style="font-family:helvetica;"><br></span><p></p><p style="line-height:150%;margin-bottom:0cm;text-align:center;"><span style="font-size:12pt;line-height:150%;"><span style="font-family:helvetica;">***</span></span></p><br><br> <p><a href="https://poeticadelmonasterio.blogspot.com/2026/05/los-silencios-de-maria.html" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/f1mRvU2 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

Sexism and Buddhism: A Shin Buddhist Apologetic

<div> <p>Amongst the three universal religions, Buddhism has the good fortune of having a generally positive image in the eyes of most modern Westerners. Unlike Christianity and Islam, the stereotypes commonly associated with the Buddha Dharma cast it as largely compatible with liberal values. This often extends to those Westerners who have embraced Buddhism as their own spiritual path.</p><p>These seekers are not infrequently distressed to encounter in Buddhism what, to their minds, are the same retrograde attitudes as those borne by the Abrahamic faiths. The following extract from an epistle by Rennyo Shōnin, the second founder of Jodo Shinshu (the largest sect of Buddhism in Japan) is representative:</p><p> <em>“To begin with, being women—hence wretched creatures of deep evil karma, burdened with the five obstacles and the three submissions—you were abandoned long ago by the tathāgatas of the ten directions and also by all the buddhas of the three periods; yet Amida Tathāgata alone graciously vowed to save just such persons [as you] and long ago made the Forty-eight Vows. Among these vows, beyond [promising] in the Eighteenth Vow to save all evildoers and women, Amida then made a further vow, the Thirty-fifth, to save women because of the depth of their evil karma and doubts.”</em> (Letter 10, Fascicle 1, BDK Edition)</p><p> What these converts imagine they encounter in texts like the above is an outrightly misogynistic equation of the feminine with “evil”, along with a denigration of the spiritual capacities of women for enlightenment. This alleged sexism in Buddhism may, in the absence of a satisfactory explanation, drive many women (and men) from the Buddha Dharma.</p><p>The present essay is intended as an apologetic for the apparently sexist and/or misogynistic statements to be found throughout the Buddhist scriptural corpus and commentaries. This apologetic will reflect a specifically Jodo Shinshu or Shin Buddhist perspective, as this is the faith of the author, but what is argued here is largely applicable to the Buddhist Tradition as a whole. It is not the author’s intention to insinuate, in defending Buddhism from charges of sexism, that Islam or Christianity are any more deserving of being so designated. Rather, others are better qualified to make similar defenses of those religions.</p><p>Naturally, this is not the first defence to be made of Buddhism on this score. However, previous <em>apologiae</em> have usually taken the form of some claim to the effect that scriptural passages that appear to denigrate women merely reflected the prejudices of the times. Since we are speaking here of religion, something which guides us to Absolute Truth outside of time, a critical reader may see such an account as suggesting cultural relativism. I hope, therefore, that the following essay, by approaching matters from a metaphysical standpoint beyond cultural relativism, may reassure those horrified by the prospect that Buddhism may in fact be misogynistic, while providing an account nuanced enough to avoid the aforementioned pitfall.</p><h3>Are women ‘of evil karma<em>’?</em></h3><p>Many of the troubling concepts we encounter in Rennyo Shōnin’s letters find their origin in the words of Shakyamuni Buddha. Indeed, if one delves into the sutras recording Shakyamuni’s revelation, we will find not only the basis of these, but also many others besides. Some will even be very surprising to the sensibilities of the modern Western reader. For example, talk of women’s insatiable sexual desire runs directly counter to the persistent Western prejudice, inherited from the Victorian era, that female sexual desire is necessarily dwarfed by the male sexual appetite, if not altogether nonexistent (a prejudice kept alive not only by contemporary misogynists and the public imagination, but also by some aspects of feminist discourse). In what follows I will make the argument that the contemporary follower of the Buddha can rest assured that these prejudicial statements can be set aside while remaining completely true to the intention of the Tathagatha. However, before doing so I will affirm one, apparently, sexist claim.</p><p>I beg my reader to bear with me in this line of argument. It is a sensitive issue, and I can only hope that my reader will proceed in a spirit of charity rather than immediately abandoning the text at this point. Before proceeding, I would like to redouble my position that the claim to be affirmed is only <em>apparently </em>sexist.</p><p>Rennyo Shonin states, in line with the sutras, that birth in a female body is the product of bad karma. On initial reading, I too found this claim disturbing. However, on deep reflection and consideration one cannot but come to the conclusion that the female body must be the product of bad karma.</p><blockquote>the female body is a source of much greater physical <em>dukkha </em>than the male</blockquote><p>It would be helpful at this junction to bring to mind Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the sex/gender distinction, keeping in mind however that in terms of a human being’s metaphysical integrity, the two aspects of are intrinsically interconnected despite their modernist separation by theoreticians like Judith Butler. ‘Sex’, in de Beauvoir’s lexicon, refers to the material body. By ‘gender’ she denotes the socially constructed identity associated with that body. With this in mind, when we read the sutras, we see that when the bad karma of being born a woman is bemoaned, it is explicitly the female <em>body</em> which is being discussed. That is to say, sex, not gender. This is not to suggest, as does de Beauvoir and her successors, that particular gender roles are arbitrarily ascribed to female bodies, nor any intrinsic inequality of genders. Rather, this distinction is here invoked to gain greater clarity of what is under discussion when Buddhism speaks of female birth being a product of karmic evil. It cannot be, as a superficial impression of such passages may lead one to believe, that femininity as such is an evil karma or else this would violate the principle of sexual complementarity.</p><figure><img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/2026/05/IMG_1408.png" alt="" width="1536"></figure><p>Shakyamuni Buddha taught that life was characterized by <em>dukkha</em>, a Sanskrit word awkward to translate into English as it encompasses both the concepts of unsatisfactoriness and suffering. It seems obvious that the female body is a source of much greater physical <em>dukkha </em>than the male. On the relatively lesser end of the spectrum women have certain relative inconveniences, like the inability to urinate standing up, smaller bladders and the pain of running without a sports bra. Further up the spectrum there is the greater effort required for the sexual satisfaction of the female body as compared to the male. In addition, there is the greater complexity of the female sex organ and urinary tract which are the cause of more frequent health complications and the attendant suffering. Then we have the rather more severe burdens like the monthly physical and emotional suffering of the ‘period’ or discharges of the menses, which runs through almost half a woman’s life today (or most of a woman’s life in times past – given lower life expectancies) culminating in the climax of the suffering called ‘menopause’ (sometimes preceded by hormonal imbalances that can, in extreme cases, lead to years of crippling depression). In addition to there is the hardship connected to pregnancy. Sore feet, aching backs and much more may be compensated for by the joy of carrying another life within one’s body, but then this too climaxes in the extreme and sometimes life-threatening physical trauma of childbirth. Childbirth often comes with its own cruel postscript of perinatal mental health afflictions, including antenatal, peripartum and postpartum depression, and incontinence. In Rennyo and Shakyamuni’s times, childbirth was a far more life-threatening undertaking than it is today, on top of which women would give birth more often on average than they do today. Added to all this, there is the generally-speaking lesser physical strength of women and their relative lack of anatomic ability to resist the violence of the most common forms of rape. This vulnerability to physical violence, sexual and otherwise, has been the source of untold suffering by women over the ages, particularly in societies lacking the state apparatus necessary for the enforced pacifism that many of us have the benefit of living under.</p><p>As Shakyamuni Buddha taught, all suffering is the product of bad karma. The female body with its attended greater <em>dukkha </em>as compared to the male body must therefore be the product of bad karma. However, it is important to recognize in affirming this what is <em>not </em>being said. It is not claimed that the female individual apart from her body is inferior to male individuals, at least in terms of her moral worth. Indeed, as Shinran Shonin[[1]] says, he (and by implication all of us) is not only an evil person, but the worst of people, an <em>icchantika</em>, bound for a self-made hell were it not for Amida Tathagata’s saving power. Shinran Shonin was clearly a man, and if he recognizes as a fact that he is amongst the worst of people, then male moral superiority over women is effectively negated from a transcendent human perspective. In this sense, we can say that Shin Buddhism teaches that women are just as <em>bad </em>as men, not worse. Similarly, we can say the Buddha Dharma teaches that women are just as <em>good</em> as men, and we will return to this point later in this paper.</p><p>One may argue that, given the historically (and often tragically contemporary) unjust conditions women are born into, female gender may also be the product of bad karma. In that all suffering is the result of bad karma, this is true. However, the singular focus in the sutras on female bodies and the relatively more contingent nature of this latter source of female <em>dukkha </em>leads one to believe that this is not what is primarily being referred to by the bad karma of being born female. It is simply that, in a general sense, the outer condition of women is differently weighted with <em>dukkha</em> than that of men.</p><h3>Women’s capacity for enlightenment</h3><p>This important point about the relative physical experience of being a woman having been addressed, we may now turn to Shakyamuni Tathagatha’s other troubling statements on the female sex. The Buddhist canon is replete with statements apparently deprecating women’s capacity to attain enlightenment. Indeed, addressing these one-by-one would require a book length treatment, given the size of the Buddhist corpus. Fortunately, this is not necessary, as they may all be addressed by way of a single argument. To appreciate this argument, however, will require a brief review of the related concepts of <em>upaya </em>and <em>pàn jiào (</em>判教)<em>.</em></p><p><em>Upaya</em> is the Sanskrit word for the doctrine that Shakyamuni Buddha tailored his teachings to the capacities of his audience. This is made possible by the fact that all the teachings, being expressed in words, inevitably fall short of the Ultimate Truth which is ineffable. That any articulation of this Truth is an inevitable compromise of the Truth allows Shakyamuni to bend and shape the teaching to best suit the needs of the audience. It should, in this context, be kept in mind that all Buddhist teachings are ultimately instrumental in that their primary purpose is not to articulate the Truth, but to communicate methods by which the Truth may be realized firsthand. The famous Buddhist turn of phrase is that the Buddha’s teachings are all fingers pointing to the moon. This means that the teachings read as a whole often appear to contradict each other.</p><p>When Buddhist texts arrived in China, usually with little or no context, Chinese exegetes had to make sense of these apparent contradictions, and so devised the system of <em>pàn jiào</em>. Different sects of East Asian Buddhism used this system to interpret different hierarchies of teachings, variously trying to determine which most accurately articulated the Truth and, more importantly, which advocated the most efficacious means for attaining Enlightenment in the context of the current times.</p><figure><img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/2026/05/IMG_1410.png" alt="" width="500"><figcaption><span>Originally portrayed as male, Guanyin evolved into a female form in China around the 12th century, representing maternal kindness and unconditional love.</span></figcaption></figure><p>The broad outlines of this hierarchy of teachings are generally similar amongst East Asian sects, although the implications vary widely. The Avatamsaka Sutra is regarded to have been expounded first, proffering (in symbolic language) the direct experience of enlightenment although this is explicitly stated to have only been comprehensible to the most spiritually advanced disciples. Thereafter the Theravadin canon was taught, followed by the far more voluminous Mahayana canon culminating in the Tathagatagarbha Sutras like the Lotus Sutra and the Mahayana MahaNirvana Sutra[[2]]. The Three Pure Land Sutras are considered to have been exposited conterminously with the Tathagatagarbha Sutras (the second Pure Land Sutra, the Contemplation Sutra, was preached at the same time as the Lotus Sutra, while the third, the Amida Sutra, was taught at some point between the Lotus and Nirvana Sutras). While the Tathagatagharbha Sutras may continue to be regarded as the peak doctrinal unveiling of Shakyamuni Buddha’s message (Hōnen Shōnin[[3]] never repudiated the Lotus Sutra as a great teaching, having come out of the Tendai Tradition which holds this sutra as supreme, while Shinran Shōnin’s doctrinal magnum opus, the <em>Kyogyoshinsho</em> relies heavily on the Nirvana Sutra), the Pure Land Sutras are held to be the peak of the teaching from a Shin Buddhist perspective. As efficacious practice supersedes articulation of ultimately ineffable Truth in Shakyamuni Buddha’s mission, the Pure Land teaching is taken to be Shakyamuni Buddha’s true purpose in appearing in this world.</p><blockquote>all apparently misogynistic statements in earlier teachings may be set aside as <em>upaya</em></blockquote><p>Having established this as the framework of Shin Buddhist exegesis, we can now address how it is that sexist statements in the Buddhist canon should be viewed. The Tathagatha’s nature being characterized by perfect compassion, his purpose in appearing in the world must logically be, and is explicitly stated by Him to be, universal salvation. That his ultimate teaching should therefore be universal salvation through Other Power is therefore unsurprising. Surveying the Sutras through the lens of the <em>pàn jiào</em> set out above, it is apparent that the Buddha’s teachings followed a pattern of being extremely exclusive early on, and becoming progressively more inclusive later, culminating in the truly universal teachings of Tathagathagarbha (doctrinally speaking) and Pure Land (practically speaking). This gradual opening follows two vectors. The first is from those highest in the hierarchy of spiritual capacity (the Bodhisattvas to whom the Avatamsaka Sutra was expounded) down to the hell-bound <em>icchantikas</em> (whose Buddha-nature is affirmed in the Nirvana Sutra, and for whose sake Amida’s Primal Vow is especially revealed). The second is along the vector of the social hierarchy, from early teachings that restricted liberation to the monastic elite[[4]], down to women, children and non-Indians. The exclusivist elitism of early Buddhism is well attested to in Julius Evola’s <em>The Doctrine of Awakening</em>. As much umbrage as the present writer takes with Evola’s broader thought, he is correct in this regard. It is telling that Evola had little interest in later Buddhism (militarized Zen of the 1940s notwithstanding) and he considered Pure Land to be a degenerate form of Buddhism. We can therefore see that the Tathagatha’s final and maximally inclusive teaching, that of the Primordial Vow and Tathagatagharba, represent His true intent, and all apparently misogynistic statements in earlier teachings may be set aside as <em>upaya</em>.</p><blockquote>Shin Buddhism regards men and women as equally good in the sense of their capacity to attain Buddhahood.</blockquote><p>The principle of <em>upaya</em> — that Shakyamuni Buddha accommodated his teachings to the capacities of his audience — applies not only on the micro-level to the specific individuals being preached to, but also on the macro-level of the time and place in the world where the Tathagata appeared. To illustrate, it is significant that the Buddha uses a lotus flower as a symbol, which naturally occurs in South and East Asia, and not an African, European or American flower. As is attested to in the sutras (most famously in the Lotus Sutra), even devoted followers of the Buddha were willing to abandon him should his message not accommodate their preconceived notions. So, less innocuously than our example of the lotus flower, it should not be surprising then that Shakyamuni should accommodate the prejudices of the South Asia of that time.</p><p>This point seems appropriate to illustrate how it is that Shin Buddhism regards men and women as equally good in the sense of their capacity to attain Buddhahood. As mentioned above, the Tathagathagarbha doctrine is crucial in Shin Buddhist soteriology. The Tathagathagarbha, or Buddha-nature, dwells in everything including, according to Shinran Shonin, plants and stones, let alone women. As articulated elegantly by D.T. Suzuki in his introduction to his translation of Shinran Shonin’s <em>Kyogyoshinsho</em>, it is by the presence of Buddha-nature in all that the establishment of faith is possible. This is explicitly stated in the <em>Kyogyoshinsho</em> to be equally true for men and women. Furthermore, once faith is established, those in whom it is established are said to be equal to Maitreya, in that they are one death away from complete Buddhahood. As this pertains equally to men and women, Buddhism can be said to view men and women as equally good in regard to their True Self.</p><h3>The 35^th Vow</h3><p>This, to my mind, leaves only one troubling matter, and that is the apparent sexist statements contained in the final teaching. From a Shin Buddhist perspective, there exist two issues in this regard, both centered on the 35^th Vow of Amida Tathagata and both referred to in Rennyo Shōnin’s letters. These are the matter of women’s abandonment by all other Buddhas and their supposed inability to attain Buddhahood in their female bodies (the most important of the Five Obstacles referred to by the Shōnin).</p><p>Amida Buddha’s 35^th Vow, detailed in the Larger Amida Sutra, reads:</p><p><em>If, when I attain buddhahood, women in the immeasurable and inconceivable buddha lands of the ten directions who, having heard my Name, rejoice in faith, awaken aspiration for enlightenment, and wish to renounce womanhood should after death be reborn again as women, may I not attain perfect enlightenment.</em> (BDK Translation)</p><p>“Reborn” here is traditionally read to mean rebirth in the Pure Land. This Vow serves as a supplement to the promise of universal salvation contained in Amida Buddha’s fundamental Vow, the 18^th Vow, in singling out women. Rennyo Shōnin makes it explicit that this is the basis for his claim that only Amida Buddha has promised women salvation. To modern eyes this vow may seem very disturbing. Why are women so wretched as to be abandoned by all other Buddhas? Why is this Vow necessary, if the 18^th Vow has already promised universal salvation? Perhaps most damningly, why must women first transform into men in order to be born in the Pure Land?</p><figure><img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/2026/05/IMG_1407.jpeg" alt="" width="1920"><figcaption><span>Standing Amida Buddha with forty eight rays which symbolize his past vows, Museo d'arte orientale (</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin?ref=sacredweb.com"><span>Turin</span></a><span>)</span></figcaption></figure><p>If we remember that Amida Buddha is, according to Shin Buddhist doctrine, the supreme Buddha and all other Buddhas are manifestations of Him, then the reason that all other Buddha’s have abandoned women is that their vows of salvation are only provisional vows to lead sentient beings to take refuge in Amida Buddha anyway. From one perspective, perhaps the despair generated by other Buddhas’ abandonment is precisely a means to drive women into the open arms of the One Buddha Amida. From another perspective, it should be pointed out that Rennyo Shōnin also wrote that only Amida’s, and not other Buddhas’, Vow was efficacious for the salvation of <em>men:</em></p><p><em>…both men and women, [should realise that] even if they entrust themselves to the compassionate vows of the various buddhas, it is extremely difficult for them [to be saved] by the power of those buddhas…</em> (Letter 4, Fascicle 5, BDK Translation)</p><p>This then begs the question why the 35^th Vow is necessary, if the 18^th already provides universal salvation? In response, we may point to women’s likely incredulity in past ages at the promise of being saved on the same terms as men. While the Buddha Dharma, and religion generally, does not disparage femininity as such, this was often was a feature of later Traditional societies (and it must born in mind that, in the grand scheme of things the era belonging to and post-dating the Axial Age comprise a late phase in the era of Tradition). As a brief digression, I would observe that it was this belittling of the feminine which set the stage for the rebellion of the feminine against the masculine. To re-employ an image I have used before to illustrate the hierarchical relationship between the sexes – the masculine is the leading element in the social body much as the head is the leading element of the body. In the societies that Buddhism was providentially intended for, the sexual dynamic had taken much the same shape as that of the well-known figure of the proud academic who, only valuing the cerebral, neglects the needs of his body only to discover as he enters middle and old age, that his mind is ultimately undermined by a sickly body.</p><p>Returning to our theme, it is to be expected that women reared in such societies should have internalized such a devaluation of the feminine, and thus be disbelieving of their own potential to achieve Buddhahood. Thus, scriptural statements that literally pertain to all may well have been read to apply to all (men). This is unsurprising in a cultural context that regarded women as less than full adult humans. Indeed, there is also a linguistic reason for this uncertainty. Chinese – the canonical language of most of the Mahayana world – uses the masculine third person pronoun 他 to denote groups of mixed sex, generating an ambiguity. Rennyo Shonin clearly recognizes the potential for such an erroneous reading, as can be seen for example from Letter 6, Fascicle 5:</p><p><em>When sentient beings of this evil world of the five defilements entrust themselves to the selected Primal Vow, indescribable, inexplicable, and inconceivable virtue fills the existence of these practitioners.</em></p><p><em>In this hymn, “sentient beings of this evil world of the five defilements” refers to all of us, including women and evildoers.</em> (BDK Translation)</p><blockquote>The 35^th Vow serves specifically to reassure women that they are, indeed, included in Amida Buddha’s promise of salvation.</blockquote><p>If it were unambiguous in the minds of the faithful of the time that women are included in the 18^th Vow (whatever our current reading of the text may be), why would Rennyo Shōnin feel the need to include this clarification? Similarly, “and evildoers”, refers to <em>icchintakas</em>, severe sinners who were excluded from salvation in Shakyamuni’s penultimate teachings. This is similar to the issue of women in that, given the context of their earlier exclusion, <em>icchintakas</em> inclusion in Shakyamuni’s final teaching was a matter that required explicit clarification and confirmation. This is not to denigrate <em>icchintakas</em>, as it is not to denigrate women, since Shinran Shōnin considered <em>himself</em> to be an <em>icchintaka</em>. The 35^th Vow is therefore a necessary addition to the 18^th Vow. It serves specifically to reassure women that they are, indeed, included in Amida Buddha’s promise of salvation.</p><p>It is noteworthy in this respect that the 35^th Vow is only mentioned in the first of the Three Pure Land Sutras. The second, the Contemplation Sutra, was preached to an all-female audience while the third, the Amida Sutra, states:</p><p><em>Sariputra, all good men and women who hear the Name of Amida Buddha expounded by all the Buddhas and the name of this sutra) are protected by all the Buddhas and dwell in the stage of Non-Retrogression for realizing highest, perfect Enlightenment.</em> (Inagaki Translation)</p><p>Here, in the final Pure Land Sutra, we see that no distinction is made at all between men and women.</p><p>Finally, the critical reader may respond that this is all well and good, but why then does the 35^th Vow suggest that women must transform into men before they can attain Buddhahood in the Pure Land? They might point to similar alleged assertions of female equality in the Lotus Sutra. In the famous story of the Dragon Princess attaining Buddhahood contained in that Sutra, the Princess transforms her female body into a male body before becoming a Buddha. Is this not a final affirmation of feminine inferiority?</p><p>We can give two answers to this. On a lower level, this may be seen as a compassionate promise of liberation from the greater relative suffering of the female body detailed above, all the more intense at the time of its revelation. A literal, contextless reading of the 35^th Vow does merely promise rebirth as a man, and does not specify rebirth in the Pure Land.</p><p>On a higher level, one should be reminded of what rebirth in the Pure Land denotes. According to Shinran Shōnin’s metaphysical reading of the Pure Land Sutras, rebirth in the Pure Land means nothing less than the immediate attainment of Buddhahood and highest, perfect Enlightenment at the moment of death. We should, in this connection, call to mind Nagarjuna Bodhisattva’s tetralemma. Nagarjuna Bodhisattva is the first patriarch of Shin Buddhism. His tetralemma refers to his teaching regarding the ontological statues of a Buddha. Nagarjuna says that enlightenment is so beyond our present deluded conceptions, only four negative statements can permissibly be made about it. A Buddha:</p><p>A)     Cannot be said to exist.</p><p>B)      Cannot be said to not exist.</p><p>C)      Cannot be said to both exist and not exist.</p><p>D)     Cannot be said to neither exist nor not exist.</p><p>This serves to exhaust all of our possible conceptions of what a thing could possibly be. To then ask what the sex of such a thing-beyond-conception has is truly facile. We cannot then but come to the conclusion that this is a final accommodation on the part of the Buddha to the prejudices of the times. Male bodies are seen as the best of human bodies, Buddhahood is the best of all things, therefore Buddhas must be said to have male bodies. We might find such an accommodation distasteful, but one can only wonder what absurd modern prejudices the Buddha would accommodate were He to appear in the world today.</p><p>There is indeed reason to argue that Buddhism did serve to some degree to erode these prejudices in Asia over the centuries. Under the influence of the 25^th Chapter of the Lotus Sutra (which describes Avalokiteshvara taking innumerable forms to save sentient beings, including that of women), Avalokiteshvara and Mahasthamaprapta Bodhisattvas (the manifestations of Amida Buddha’s compassion and wisdom respectively) have come to be depicted as female in East Asian Buddhist art as a matter of course. Perhaps most East Asians today would find the notion that Avalokiteshvara could be a man quite baffling. Some years ago, I told a Chinese friend about the Tibetan doctrine that the Dalai Lama is a manifestation of Avalokiteshvara Buddha. She assured me that this is quite impossible, because Avalokiteshvara “is a woman.”</p><p>A final point needs to be made in this connection. If the ultimate ontological status of the Buddha cannot be said to be gendered in any way, it is true that his provisionally manifested bodies are of necessity male. There are good symbolic reasons for this that I have addressed in an earlier essay, <a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-53/why-is-amida-male/">“Why Is Amida Male?”</a>.</p><h3>Conclusion</h3><p>I hope that what I have written in the above has provided readers with comfort and reassurance that there is in fact no discrimination against women in the Buddha Dharma. </p><p>I would like to close with a final observation. The Truth which Shakyamuni Buddha sought to reveal to us is Absolute. That is to say, it is not contingent, and stands outside of time. By very virtue of this fact, however, it is therefore ineffable. In order to gain access to this Truth, it has to enter into time, and be expressed in words. To borrow an image from the Daoists, the Buddha must carve the block for us. This means the ineffable Truth must be expressed in a series of symbols that are necessarily contingent. By symbols I mean not only the concepts expressed in words, but the words themselves (for what are words, but a complex of symbols). In doing so, they are caught up in all of the unsatisfactoriness or <em>dukkha</em> in this world of suffering which we endure.</p><p>The Buddha’s skillful means or <em>upaya</em> therefore negotiate contingent socio-historical facts, such as deep prejudice against women. What was historically a compassionate means of overcoming this prejudice in India of the Fourth Century BC and Japan of the 15^th Century AD, now becomes a further impediment to accessing the Truth. Perhaps this is a symptom of <em>Mappo,</em> the Dharma Ending Age. The task then of Buddhist teachers in this age is to rearticulate the Dharma while staying true to the primordial content of the teaching, in order to make it accessible to all those possessed of the good karma to do so.</p><p>[[1]]: The founder of Jodo Shinshu</p><p>[[2]]: Strictly speaking, part of the Theravadin sutras (recorded in Pali) were spoken contemporaneously with the Mahayana sutras, but for audiences of – in the Mahayana view – more limited ability. The Pali Nibbana Sutta was spoken, for example, after the similarly name Mahayana MahaNirvana Sutra. The order given here is therefore only secondarily and imperfectly chronological, and primarily in terms of its anagogical assent</p><p>[[3]]: The first founder of an independent Pure Land school in Japan</p><p>[[4]]: This could perhaps be seen as a Buddhist analogue to Brahmanism</p> </div> <p><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/sexism-and-buddhism-a-shin-buddhist-apologetic/" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/f1mRvU2 / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. No todo es lo que parece.</p>

What is God? Mechthild of Magdeburg on the Sphere and the Flowing Light

<div> <p> </p> <div> <div><div>Mechthild of Magdeburg’s <i><em>Flowing Light of the Godhead</em></i> is one of the most significant works from the Middle Ages in the German language. It is deemed to be the first book in German by a female mystic of the 13^th century. The author writes of the way to God from a consistently univocal – but not pantheistic – perspective. She provides in <i><em>Flowing Light</em></i> the perfect answer to the question of what God is: an unending, flowing, absolute sphere of light. And in this sphere lives the human soul in flowing light. This essay by Dr. Andrea Nowak-Enshaie was written in German and is translated by Nasra Hassan.</div></div><p>Who was Mechthild of Magdeburg? Who was the author of <em>Flowing Light of the Godhead</em>? What do we know about her? The short answer is: we know little. Old – especially Germanistic – research has some statements about her, but these were and still are not, historically corroborated.  Examples include: Magdeburg as her domicile, Mechthild as beguine, her date of birth and death, a certain 'Balduin' mentioned in the text as her real brother.  </p><p>What can be said about her? There was in great probability a 'Mechthild' who was the author of <em>Flowing Light</em>. She lived in the 13^th century: 1207/1208 is often cited as her year of birth, and 1282 or 1294 as her year of death. More definite dates are not available.  It can be said with some certainty that in 1270, as an old woman, she moved to the Helfta cloister near Eisleben (Sachsen-Anhalt in Germany). </p><figure><img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/2026/05/IMG_1394.jpeg" alt="" width="1382"><figcaption><span>Helfta monastery today</span></figcaption></figure><p>Based on the profound knowledge displayed in <em>Flowing Light</em>, Mechthild’s family of origin was most probably noble and wealthy.  Without doubt, however, is her appreciation for the Dominican Order, which is often specifically mentioned. </p><p>What is Mechthild’s sole work?  A book to which God Himself gave the title<em>: A</em> <em>Flowing Light of the Godhead</em>:</p><p>“Oh, Lord and God, who made this book?”</p><p>“I made it, in My powerlessness to hold Myself back from My Gift.”</p><p>“Oh, Lord, what should this book be called, so that it expresses only Your Glory?”</p><p>“It should be called: <em>A Flowing Light of My Godhead</em>, for all those hearts which live without falsehood.” </p><p>(FL, Prologue: author’s translation)</p><p>The book was regarded by her to be under the direct protection of God, legitimized and defended by Him, such that God Himself claims that the words and the sound of the words represent His Trinity:</p><p>“.…Thus revealed God Himself immediately to my sorrowful soul and held this book in His Right Hand and said: “My dear, do not sadden yourself too much, no one can burn the Truth.  Whoever wants to take it from My Hand, must be stronger than I. The book is triune and describes Me Alone. This Pergament which encloses it, describes My pure lustrous, just Humanity, which suffered death through You.  The words describe My Glorious Deity, which, from my Divine Mouth, flows hour by hour into your soul.  The sound of the words describes My Living Spirit, and the unadulterated truth manifests itself from within…<em>.</em>”</p><p>(FL, II, 26: author’s translation)</p><p><em>The Flowing Light</em> is the only written text that has been ascribed to Mechthild of Magdeburg. If she wrote other works, these were either destroyed, penned anonymously, or transmitted under other names. The date of the book’s origin is given as between 1250 and the time of her death.  It was apparently written in middle-German or middle-low German in the region of Magdeburg, Halle, or Helfta. The original text no longer exists; the oldest fragment of <em>Flowing Light</em> in German was found in Moscow in 2008; that copy of the text is close to the original but dated end of the 13^th century.  The only translation of the complete manuscript of the text is apparently an Upper-German translation from the mid-14^th century, which was discovered and edited anew in the 19^th century in the Einsiedeln cloister in Switzerland.  </p><figure><img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/2026/05/IMG_1395.webp" alt="" width="416"><figcaption><span>The 1861 text of Mechthild’s book, now in the possession of the Einsiedeln Library in Switzerland</span></figcaption></figure><p>With that discovery began a phase of scientific and scholarly interest with the text, which intensified after the publication of the 1990 and 1993 critical edition by Hans Neumann and Gisela Vollmann-Profe.  Different  scientific disciplines have dealt with this work: German mediaeval studies, religious studies, and theology. In 1995, Margot Schmidt produced a second reworked translation of <em>Flowing Light</em>  in new high-German; the edition in 2010 by Gisela Vollmann-Profe translated into new-high German simplified once more the text’s accessibility; and in 1997, Frank Tobin published an English translation titled <em>The Flowing Light of the Godhead</em>.</p><p><em>The Flowing Light </em>is structured in seven books, the Latin version has only the first six. It is difficult to assign to it a literary genre; though its autobiographic character, comparable to a diary, is often emphasized, this, however, should not preoccupy us – far more important is the high literary quality of the text.  Mechthild wrote her book in rhymed prose with lyrical segments; she varied in individual and unforced forms the spiritual, courtly and vernacular poetry.  Stylistic devices she used are, for example, metaphors, comparisons, allegories, hymns and paradoxical statements, by which Mechthild expresses what is essential for her. The character of personal dialogue in <em>Flowing Light</em> is significant, conveying a sense of the insoluble bond between God and man. The dialogue – with oneself, with God, and with others – is thus the necessary logical form of Mechthild’s writings.</p><blockquote>I await you in the orchard of love and pluck for you flowers of sweet communion</blockquote><p>The immediacy of the emotional/erotic experiences described in the text, often disconcerting for researchers, is not only an expression of the tremendous intensity of the experience of love, but also expression of the knowledge that God, through Himself, is everywhere and in everything. </p><p>“…. Now I say to you where, then, I am: I am through Myself in all places and in all things, as I always was without beginning; and I await you in the orchard of love and pluck for you flowers of sweet communion and prepare for you a layer of pleasurable grass of sacred knowledge; and the radiant sun of My eternal Godhead illuminates you with the secret wonder of My Fullness/My Desire/My Joy,…” </p><p>(FL, II, 25: author’s translation)</p><p>The speech of <em>Flowing Light</em> is imagery, for which Mechthild uses all the resources available to her, whether of high literary, philosophical or theological rank, or adopts colloquial expressions such as songs, poems, proverbs and puzzles.  The images are characterized through all manner of linguistic forms, whether nouns, verbs – especially intransitive and present-perfect continuous verbs, and adjectives – and she made her own abstract forms with the addition of suffixes like “-ity” and “-ness”. Her texts were made to resonate with sound, melody and rhythm, with the support of speech. Mechthild endeavoured to convey God’s courtly language, which was not ordinarily heard in the “kitchen”, the world of man. (I,2) </p><h3>God as an Unending Sphere</h3><p>Subsequent to these introductory comments, we can now proceed to address the question: <em>what is God?</em> – associated with the query: <em>where is God?</em>  </p><p>The following quote from <em>Flowing Light </em>addresses<em> </em>this<em>:</em></p><p>“….Where was God before He created something? He was in Himself, and for Him were all Things present and visible, as these are at present. In what shape was our Lord and God formed? Exactly like a Sphere, and all things were enclosed/included/embraced/encompassed in Him, without lock and without door.  The bottom part of the Sphere is a fathomless base beneath all abysses; the topmost part of the Sphere is a height above which is nothing; the circumference of the Sphere is an incomprehensible circle.  God had not yet become Creator.  But as He was creating all Things, was the Sphere opened?  No, it is still complete, and it will/should/must certainly always remain complete.  When God became Creator, all creatures became visible to themselves: man, to love God, to enjoy and to recognize and to obey Him; the birds and animals, to maintain their nature; the dead creatures to remain in their being-there….”</p><p>(FL, VI, 31: author’s translation)   </p><p>God is formed like an Unending Sphere and He is Flowing Light: the connection of these two perceptions in the image of an unending flowing perfect Sphere of Light conveys an overwhelming impression of the incomprehensibility of God. Although difficult to envision, Mechthild’s image is simultaneously comprehensible and yet completely open to every association of every person. If we examine the exact formulation, it becomes clear that in two passages in the text lies a more crucial difference: the portrayal of the <em>gestalt</em> of the Sphere is no self-statement by God but a profound description of Mechthild’s gnosis: God was formed like a sphere. </p><p>God did not give Himself the <em>gestalt</em> of a sphere! So who then did? It was the movement of He Himself in flowing light, it was the actualization of He Himself as the <em>materie </em>of light and it was the becoming-revealed of His creation for He Himself and His creatures, who always were, and who, in the everlasting creation through the effect of the fragmentation of the pure <em>materie</em> of light, in coincidental mixing of the <em>materie</em> of light, showed itself: there arose the earth-light, the air-light, the water-light, and the fire-light – the basic components of all life (based on the teaching of the four elements). In a few words, Mechthild portrays in this short description of the <em>gestalt</em> of the sphere a version of a narrative of creation which names God as Creator and integrates creation as a coinciding event arising through the effect of the movement of God to and within Himself.  </p><div><div><i><b><strong>Excursus</strong></b></i>: The theologian, natural philosopher and mathematician, Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253), Bishop of Lincoln, incorporated in his writing <i><em>On Light</em></i> (1225) a Big Bang theory of natural philosophy, which led to the origination of nine perfect spheres around the earth and one imperfect sphere of the earth. His theory was based on the application of Aristotelian logic and observation of nature. It is not known whether Mechthild was aware of his text. Although it cannot be proven, it is not impossible that she was familiar with it, since Robert Grosseteste was part of a large network which reached beyond the borders of England. References in the contents of <i><em>On Light</em></i> and <i><em>Flowing Light </em></i>would be possible, if at all, only by a detailed analysis of both works, which the author has not undertaken.</div></div><blockquote>Your sweet hunt tires Me so, so that I desire to cool Myself in your pure soul into which I am tied in.</blockquote><p>In <em>Flowing Light</em>, the sphere is described simultaneously as being without dimension as well as being spatially and temporally constituted. These descriptions are conveyed in the text through Mechthild’s usage of different tenses, so that past and present are interwoven and, as it were, voided. This paradoxical connection is fundamental to the relationship between God and man.  Both need space and time as well as spacelessness and timelessness:  God, to live man as counterpart/as duality; man, to perceive God in dimensionlessness.  </p><p>God is forced into the human soul, the soul hunts for God: God speaks to the soul:</p></div><p></p><p>“….Your sweet hunt tires Me so, so that I desire to cool Myself in your pure soul into which I am tied in.  The sighs of the quaking of your wounded heart have expelled from you My Justice. This is appropriate for you and for Me: I cannot Be without you.  However far apart we are divided, we simply cannot be separated...’” </p><p>(FL, II, 25: author’s translation)</p><p>This description unites the interweaving of the Unending as Cause of Movement and the Finites as the Effect of this Movement. With that, the Sphere closes the Unity, the Oneness and the Plurality of the effects into Itself.  Also, the Trinity of the sphere creates comprehensible spaces for man.  These three spaces bring simultaneously the external arrangement of the habitable geographic space (subterranean areas of water, on earth and in heaven) and the internal arrangement of man’s spiritual constitution in three areas: close to earth, encompassing heaven and earth, and Heaven. </p><p>In Chapter II, 19 of <em>Flowing Light</em>, these three regions are designated as the three Heavens.  The devil has free access to the first two heavens, if man makes this possible for him. If man finds himself in the third heaven, he is close to God. The devil is barred.</p><p>The trinity refers to the established three hierarchies of angels in Mechthild’s time (for example, in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite).  It should again be emphasized that the horizontal trinity of the sphere does not mean demarcated spaces and times, rather that these also always work flowing into one another – and are simultaneously without dimension.</p><p>The expression ”flowing light of the Godhead” is mentioned only once in the prologue of the book.  It thus belongs to the group of words which Mechthild of Magdeburg uses only once in her text.  These are one of the many <em>hapax legomena, </em>which form, as it were, the many stanchions of the philosophical background of the text. The sphere, too, is mentioned, though many times, only in this chapter VI, 31. But the sphere works through the entire text; the book is the image, the language, the sound of God, while God Himself legitimizes this textual flowing-from-Him. God is formed as Sphere, hence this book, too, is to be seen as sphere. </p><p>The entire text of <em>Flowing Light</em> is written systematically from the perspective of non-duality, encompassing the One in Two, Two in One. <em>The Flowing Light</em> incorporates the doctrine of God emanating from the Unending, and cosmological perceptions, natural philosophical ideas and ethics, having the human perspective as basis.  </p><blockquote>mankind can see God’s Light/Beauty only when it goes in search of it.</blockquote><p>The flowing light shows itself in humankind, the souls, like God, being themselves light (II,9: God to Bride/Soul: “… you are a light of the world”; II,10: The Bride/Soul to God: “ … You are the Light in all Lights”). The flow is evident in the light of five prophets, who illustrate Mechthild’s book (III, 20), the Light of God spreads Itself all over through four rays of light  (II, 3), words can be light (III,2: Solomon’s words; III, 20: the words of the psalms; the flowing light with its words), love is light (II, 19; V,28), the Holy Spirit is Light (III,1; III, 4).  The light brings clarity (II,7), the light brings and is, Gnosis (II,19; IV, 12), the light itself is reason (I,46), is the capacity to discriminate/judge (I,46), light is generosity/goodness, attention/watchfulness (I,46), it is Truth (II,3).  But also the devil is light (II, 19). With the acquisition of the incomprehensible all-inclusive light, the soul can recognize how God is All in All (II,19).  </p><p>Through the image of light, God comes closer to mankind; the images which the light produces vizualize/realize the Presence of God in the life of each.  Light shows mankind the external beauty of creation, and it summons mankind to seek this beauty, brought forth by light, also within. But different from the external exposed beauty, mankind can see God’s Light/Beauty only when it goes in search of it. This means that mankind must detach itself from the consciousness of its duality towards God (created through the fall of man: this was the necessary act for man’s freedom, which was granted to him by God) and gain the knowledge of union with God. Only then does mankind see in itself the beauty, the endlessness, the light, of all life.     </p><p>Mankind must place their lives in a univocal perspective to be able to experience God as Light in themselves.  The path to this perspective is, however, a laborious one (I, 46): characteristics such as self-knowledge, truthfulness, moral integrity, clarity of thought, reason, wisdom, inner strength, courage; but also love, humility, disdain for material things and personal traits, which arise from egoism and greed, desire for union with God, a conscience aligned with love, joy on this path, and, not least, peace with the inadequacy of human endeavours and simultaneously with the success of effort. </p><blockquote>You should love the Nothing, you should flee from the Something, … you live thus in the true desert.</blockquote><p><em>The Flowing Light</em> is in its totality an involvement with this path in a univocal perspective. Its beauty is described in encounters with God, which recall the <em>Song of Songs</em> of Solomon in the Old Testament: </p><p>The soul to God: “…Lord, You are my Lover/Beloved, my Desire, my Flowing Fount, my Sun, and I am Your mirror.”</p><p>(FL, I, 4, translation by Vollmann-Profe)</p><p>The light here is represented in the image of the sun.  But not only is God described in this image, the soul also radiates with the unfolded Light of God within it, as does the sun.</p><p>God to the soul: “…you shine like the sun.”</p><p>(FL, I, 16: author’s translation)</p><p>These are overwhelming images and yet Mechthild of Magdeburg formulates in a short verse:</p><p>“You should love the Nothing, you should flee from the Something, … you live thus in the true desert.” </p><p>(FL, I, 35: author’s translation)</p><p>This also means that the images which describe light are ‘nothing’, signify ‘nothing’. Each image passes away and leaves behind only emptiness.  But what does this mean for the existence of Light? It does not allow itself to be grasped in its flowing, it does not allow itself to be discerned in its being-still: the Light simply passes away.  The emptiness and the Light penetrate each other – endlessly: </p><p>“….The emptiness is still unmixed and untouched, no one is in it, and it is clear/lustrous in itself and glowing/playful in rapture, to honour God….”</p><p>(FL, III, 1: author’s translation)</p><p>Mechthild challenges her readers to seek the Nothing that the Everything is – only after having experienced the endless persisting silent movement and its realization in daily life, does the seeking and craving person reach the univocal perspective. Thus is Mechthild obligated to the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite.</p><div><div><i><b><strong>Excursus</strong></b></i>: In her notes on this verse, Vollmann-Profe (2010) writes: “The short piece with paraphrases such as “Nothing” and “desert” for God points towards Eckhart (Meister Eckhart) …. The relationship between M.(Mechthild)-Eckhart has been discussed often in more recent research, with the result that it is accepted that Eckhart was not only familiar with FL, but that he was also influenced by Mechthild’s works…”</div></div><p>If God is formed as a Sphere, what is the form that people have? Logically, they are too spherical. But which part is spherical? Apparently not the physical appearance. To the question of human anthropology, Mechthild developed a complex answer, hidden deep in the text of <em>Flowing Light</em>. Her answer explains the logical relationship between the Perfection of the Form of God as Sphere and the human sphere: human beings can experience themselves as spherical after completing the path to union with God.</p><p>That which is certain as logical knowledge already prior to the completion of the Path [for God created the Soul in His Own Image (I,41)] is then also tangible as sense, as image, or as conviction.   </p><p>The process of the Self-Knowledge of God is presented in <em>Flowing Light</em> as an occurrence of the perpetual around and in-itself-circling reflection of God and Soul:</p><p>The Soul is Mirror for God to reflect the world:</p><p>“The Soul is … a mirror of the world …”</p><p>(FL, II, 16: author’s translation, also I, 4) </p><p>Mechthild writes that God has a “Mirror of the Godhead” (III, 1), He is and/or has an “eternal Mirror” (III, 11), there is the “Mirror of the Holy Trinity” (VI, 41) and the “Mirror of Eternity” (VII, 1). Thus, the mirror integrates itself with the image of the unending sphere as means to enlightenment.  Especially impressive is how the soul addresses God:</p><p>“ … You are my Spiegelberg, a feast for my eyes, …”</p><p>(FL, I, 20: translation: Vollmann-Profe).  </p><p>The word “Spiegelberg“ belongs to the <em>hapax legomena</em> in <em>Flowing Light</em>. Above and beyond that, other than in <em>Flowing Light</em>, the word “Spiegelberg” used as a noun in middle-high-German literature is documented only in the sermons of Mechthild’s contemporary Berthold of Regensburg.</p><blockquote>Sinfulness is frozen light, which also belongs to the sphere! Hell is not a place external to the sphere: the sphere contains everything.</blockquote><p>The human soul is kept safe in the unending flowing light of endlessness (of God).  It has no beginning and no end.  But this description does not refer to a modern “feel-good” faith, which promises each one to be lifted to a divine paradise. Mechthild writes in the 13^th century of the Christian era: the existence of hell, and of purgatory, were at that time hardly dismissed, but certainly interpreted differently.   </p><figure><img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/2026/05/IMG_1398.jpeg" alt="" width="550"><figcaption><span>Thomas Norton, ‘Crede mihi seu ordinale’, in </span><i><em>Tripus aureus, hoc est, tres tractatus chymici selectissimi</em></i><span>, 1618. Engraving, 19 cm × 13 cm. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Rar 8239. </span><a href="https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-34295?ref=sacredweb.com"><span>https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-34295</span></a></figcaption></figure><p>Mechthild did not exclude negative human characteristics, the existence of hell, the existence of the devil.  For her, these belonged to divine and human reality, just as man, with his behaviour can be present in both purgatory and in Heaven.  However: for her, hell was a space created by each for themselves out of their negative traits, desires, misdemeanors, sins, crimes.  Already on earth, each lives in such a hell and leaves that domain not even after death.  Sinfulness is frozen light, which also belongs to the sphere! Hell is not a place external to the sphere: the sphere contains everything.</p><p>According to Mechthild, humans consist of light, but of a weaker <em>materie</em> of light, which becomes stronger in the recalled remembrance of unity with God.  Here, the weakness of the human <em>materie</em> of light means to be imprisoned in duality, to be subjected to becoming and the passing away of a being with free will but still subject to the limitation of one’s own will and that of others. An example are the needs of the body, its birth, and its death. In the words of the soul to the body at the end of the last chapter in <em>Flowing Light</em>:</p><p>“… O my most beloved prison, in which I am shackled, I thank you for all where you obeyed me; even when you oft afflicted me, you were still a support. …”</p><p>(FL, VII, 65: translation: Vollmann-Profe)</p><p>Despite all the weaknesses of the <em>materie</em> of light, it is the basis of creation, the cause of being-there, the bedrock of the individuality which makes seeking possible. The search for the sphere of light is the search for completion and the search for the flawless beauty of all life.  Mechthild of Magdeburg saw it and experienced it. She wanted to open the path to it for all.</p><h3>Bibliography </h3><p><strong>German References</strong></p><p>Mechthild von Magdeburg "Das fließende Licht der Gottheit", hrsg. v. Hans Neumann, Band I: Text, besorgt von Gisela Vollmann-Profe, München und Zürich 1990.</p><p>Mechthild von Magdeburg "Das fließende Licht der Gottheit", hrsg. v. Hans Neumann, Band II: Untersuchungen, ergänzt und zum Druck eingerichtet von Gisela Vollmann-Profe, München und Zürich 1993.</p><p>Mechthild von Magdeburg, Das fließende Licht der Gottheit, zweisprachige Ausgabe, aus dem Mittelhochdeutschen übersetzt und herausgegeben von Gisela Vollmann-Profe, Verlag der Weltreligionen im Insel Verlag Berlin 2010.</p><p><strong>[English]</strong></p><p>Mechthild of Magdeburg <em>The Flowing Light of Godhead</em> pub. Hans Neumann, Vol. I: text, provided by Gisela Vollmann-Profe, Munich and Zurich 1990.</p><p>Mechthild of Magdeburg <em>The Flowing Light of Godhead</em>, pub. Hans Neumann, Vol. II: Investigations, expanded and prepared for printing by Gisela Vollmann-Profe, Munich and Zurich 1993.</p><p>Mechthild of Magdeburg <em>The Flowing Light of Godhead</em>, bilingual edition, translated from middle-high-German by Gisela Vollmann-Profe, publisher World Religions, publishing house Insel Berlin 2010.  </p><p><strong>Andrea Nowak-Enshaie</strong> studied History of Religion, Iranian Studies, and Sociology at the University of Göttingen (Germany). She earned her PhD (Dr. Phil.) in Studies of Religion from the University of Vienna (Austria) with a dissertation on <em>The Flowing Light of the Godhead of Mechthild von Magdeburg</em>. She taught courses on garden design. Her main interests are medieval Christian philosophy and mysticism. She published (with Rüdiger Lohlker): Das islamische Paradies als Zeichen: Zwischen Märtyrerkult und Garten, in <em>Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes</em> 99 (2009), pp.199-225 (‘The Islamic Paradise as a Signifier: Martyrs and Gardens’) and Persische Gärten – Orte der Imagination, in <em>Gartenpraxis</em> 08 (2009), ​pp.44-49 (Persian Gardens – Places of Imagination).</p> <div> <div> <a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/hasanaginica-a-bosnian-muslim-folk-ballad/"> </a><div><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/hasanaginica-a-bosnian-muslim-folk-ballad/"> <img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/size/w400/2026/02/IMG_0985.jpeg" alt=""> </a></div><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/hasanaginica-a-bosnian-muslim-folk-ballad/"> </a> <a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/four-poems-on-spiritual-submission-a-muslim-perspective/"> </a><div><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/four-poems-on-spiritual-submission-a-muslim-perspective/"> <img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/size/w400/2026/02/IMG_6464-1.jpeg" alt=""> </a></div><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/four-poems-on-spiritual-submission-a-muslim-perspective/"> </a> <a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/four-poems-on-faith-and-love-a-christian-perspective/"> </a><div><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/four-poems-on-faith-and-love-a-christian-perspective/"> <img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/size/w400/2026/02/IMG_0991.jpeg" alt=""> </a></div><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/four-poems-on-faith-and-love-a-christian-perspective/"> </a> <a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/book-review-the-sacred-dance-of-ancient-india-by-sarah-vieira-magalhaes/"> </a><div><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/book-review-the-sacred-dance-of-ancient-india-by-sarah-vieira-magalhaes/"> <img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/size/w400/2026/04/IMG_1262.jpeg" alt=""> </a></div><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/book-review-the-sacred-dance-of-ancient-india-by-sarah-vieira-magalhaes/"> </a> <a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/pluribus-transhumanism-and-theosis/"> </a><div><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/pluribus-transhumanism-and-theosis/"> <img src="https://storage.ghost.io/c/26/b5/26b5a426-214e-4897-b490-fa1deaa9b7ae/content/images/size/w400/2026/01/IMG_0968.png" alt=""> </a></div><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/pluribus-transhumanism-and-theosis/"> </a> </div> </div> </div> <p><a href="https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-54/what-is-god-mechthild-of-magdeburg-on-the-sphere-and-the-flowing-light/" target="_blank">- Enlace a artículo -</a></p> <p>Más info en https://ift.tt/y15NEzC / Tfno. & WA 607725547 Centro MENADEL (Frasco Martín) Psicología Clínica y Tradicional en Mijas. #Menadel #Psicología #Clínica #Tradicional #MijasPueblo</p> <p>*No suscribimos necesariamente las opiniones o artículos aquí compartidos. 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