I had some thoughts while perusing through Daniel J. Marrs’ “To Become Transfigured: Reconstructing Søren Kierkegaard’s Christological Anthropology.” As a Kierkegaard novice, the thoughts are not about the piece itself, but rather about how strikingly similar some of the strands of Kierkegaard’s thoughts are to those found in Eastern religions.
Let me pull a couple of quotes.
For Kierkegaard, the dynamic, complex synthesis of body, soul, and spirit is fundamentally directed toward the task of becoming a self. (Marrs 2015, 40)
Well right away we have the Chinese jing 精, qi 氣, and shen 神. Jing probably means something like “essence,” but is analogous to corpus, or σῶμα. Qi is the famous qi of qigong 氣功, for example. It literally means “breath,” but here is analogous to anima, or ψυχή. Shen means “god” or “spirit,” and is analogous to spiritus, or νους.
God as “pure subjectivity” is a self-relation for whom the self-relation does not break apart into a subject-object duality. (Marrs 2015, 200)
Put another way, on Kierkegaard’s account, the human self must eventually leave behind the intrinsically sinful “subject-object” mode of self-consciousness, and enter into an utterly exclusive “subject-Subject” relational selfhood called “worship.” (Marrs 2015, 267)
In the Mahāmudrā system of meditation, the highest yoga—in this case a meditative attainment or level—called nonmeditation, is characterized by the absence of the subject–object dichotomy (Ṅag-dbaṅ-kun-dgaʾ-bstan-ʾdzin 2020, 393). Bernadette Roberts, a Catholic contemplative, also reported a meditative experience called “no-self” characterized, stunningly, by what she calls “Pure Subjectivity,” and similarly, the absence of the subject–object dichotomy (Roberts 1981, “Pure Subjectivity”).
Gorampa Sönam Sengé, one of the major philosophers of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism, posits that ultimate truth is beyond the subject–object dichotomy (Thakchoe 2007, 120–121).
The question of whether martyrdom is the end point of Kierkegaard’s anthropology is hotly contested. What I find particularly interesting here, though, is that martyrdom appears at least as a strong likelihood not because of the world’s sinfulness but because eternity fundamentally opposes temporality as such—or, not to put too fine a point on it, because the eternally unconditioned God can only relate unconditionally with creatures, through the unconditional requirement which eventually must annihilate all admixture of temporal conditions and relations if there is any hope of truly relating spiritually (unconditionally) to God. (Marrs 2015, 203–204)
That martyrdom is the endpoint of Kierkegaard’s thought seems interesting, as Bernadette Roberts seems to write the same:
But if we, like Christ, can realize our oneness with the divine (the unitive state) and live it out in the marketplace just as he did, we too will come to his same experience of death and resurrection. The way it went for Christ is the way it goes for us. (Roberts [1989] 2005, 63)
In fact in Daoism there is a similar strain of thought:
Grand Darkness is the palace where those who have accumulated the Dao refine their forms. When there is no place for them to stay in the world, the worthy withdraw and, feigning death, pass through Grand Darkness to have their images reborn on the other side. This is to be “obliterated without perishing.” The profane are unable to accumulate good deeds, so when they die it is truly death. They are taken away in service of the Earth Offices. (Bokenkamp 1997, 102)
When a Daoist’s practices are complete, the spirits of the Dao call that person to return. Departing the world through feigned death, the person passes through Grand Darkness to be born again and not perish. That is longevity. Commoners have no good merits, and when they die, they belong to the Earth Office. That is to perish. (Bokenkamp 1997, 135)
Kierkegaard, according to Marrs, has a spirituality that orients people away from temporal conditions, and towards physical death—God?—whilst simultaneously positing awareness of God as being distinct from ordinary, reflexive self-awareness. This sounds radically similar to Roberts’ whole project (Roberts 1981, [1985] 1991, [1989] 2005), and also bears resemblance to certain ideas found in Buddhism and Daoism.
While Daoism does have a rich tradition of “separation from the corpse,” or shijie 屍解, which in some sense can be assimilated to physical martyrdom, I’m not aware of a martyrdom concept in Buddhism. Judaism and Islam certainly both have their martyrdoms. The former calls it, “Sanctification of The Name,” or Kiddush HaShem, whereas the latter calls it shahīd, or “witness.”
But, perhaps the reason Buddhism doesn’t have explicit, physical martyrdom is because, from the outset, the tradition is already so oriented towards the truth of suffering and denial of worldly desires, that its martyrdom is accomplished “bloodlessly,” as a kind of “slow burn.” This would explain how certain systems of Tibetan Buddhist meditation (e.g. Mahāmudrā) or philosophy (e.g. Gorampa’s two truths) conceive of the ultimate attainment or truth being the absence of the subject–object dichotomy. This absence of the subject–object dichotomy is clearly analogous to Roberts’ “no-self” experience, which she equates with Christ’s own death on the cross (Roberts [1989] 2005, 63).
Thus, Buddhism probably has Kierkegaardian “dying to immediacy”—immediacy, being the six āyatana, or the five senses plus the mind—“built-in,” which may explain why Buddhism doesn’t have in-your-face martyrdom.
The goal of this blog, in some sense, is to point out how it doesn’t matter which religion one practices. One simply has to be a practitioner of one of the major world religions to be saved. Already, Marrs portrays Kierkegaard as setting up a kind of antagonism between the eternal and temporal in his works, with the former exerting an unconditional requirement on beings in the latter.
Stunningly, Marrs draws out a Kierkegaardian line of thought, where most people are portrayed as being sub-human, sub-animal even.
Kierkegaard asserts outright that the pagan attitude towards temporality results in the loss of humanity: the pagan in the worldly circumstance of poverty, for instance, is “tortured by being nothing, futilely tries to become something. . . . It is not the fruits that withdraw themselves from him; it is he himself who withdraws himself even from being what he is. For he is not a human being.” (Marrs 2015, 157)
This line of thought is well-known both in Buddhism and Imāmī Shīʿism. For the former, we have the Pāḷi Canon, which shockingly claims that saṃsāra is, essentially, the experience of repeatedly being reborn in hell (or some equivalent of it),1 which appears to be a roundabout way of saying that most people are not human. We further have a quote from Guru Rinpoché, or Padmsambhava:
The reason for this difficulty is that the six classes of beings are like a heap of grain. The hell beings, hungry ghosts and animals are like the bottom half, the demigods the upper half, and gods and humans are merely the tip. Compared to the other classes of beings, it seems impossible to gain a human form. Tsogyal, try to count the beings of the six realms! (Kunsang [1994] 2013, 127)
Humanity is rare. As mentioned, this concept is meme of Imāmī Shīʿism, and is in fact the namesake of Etan Kohlberg’s In Praise of the Few (Kohlberg 2020). This concept was known to the Islamic philosophers as well (Meisami 2018, 45). The most striking Imāmī Shīʿī quote involves one of the disciples of the Imāms exclaiming at the sheer amount of worshipers circumambulating the Kaʿba, only to be told by the Imām that most of the pilgrims are “monkeys or pigs.” The Imām will then perform a miracle transforming the vision of the disciple, which then demonstrates how the mass of worshipers is actually a horde of animals, with only a few human beings dotting the crowd (Kohlberg 2020, 386).
Personally, I struggle with whether or not this path ends in martyrdom. For Rabbi Akiva, it certainly did, but it is equally true that Roberts did not martyr herself literally and still made it to the end of the path. I’m partial to Christopher Barnett’s view that martyrdom is not to be sought, but rather is a high probability for someone who trods the Christian path. The Christian’s lack of worldly wisdom makes them vulnerable to the world (Barnett [2011] 2016, 178).
Many Daoists outright died in pursuit of immortality, but looking back, did they really die (Strickmann 1979, 131–132)? I think the correct perspective is that it matters how you “distribute your calories.” Buddhism emphasizes the disjunction between the eternal and temporal immediately, and so there is no martyrdom evident in its teachings because the ripping away of finitude happens piecemeal. Islam strongly emphasizes grasping the finite, but also God’s ﷻ forgiveness of sins. Thus martyrdom is set up not in victimhood, but in jihād, which can be internal as well as external. This clearly assimilates to martyrdom. Ṣūfism then captures fanāʾ, or self-annihilation.
There is a funny Islamic saying, that every believer is a martyr, “even if he dies in his bed” (Friedman 2010, 148). I think the point is that the world of finitude passes away for everyone, the gnostic and ignorant alike. But for the one with a foothold in the infinite, the passing is painless, not even a real passing. Christ’s death on the cross demonstrated this painless transition: after dying, he got right back up after a couple of days.
Bibliography
Barnett, Christopher B. (2011) 2016. Kierkegaard, Pietism and Holiness. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. London: Routledge.
Bokenkamp, Stephen R. 1997. Early Daoist Scriptures. With a contribution by Peter Nickerson. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Friedman, Yaron. 2010. The Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs: An Introduction to the Religion, History and Identity of the Leading Minority in Syria. Islamic History and Civilization 77, edited by Sebastian Günther and Wadad Kadi. Leiden, NL: Brill.
Kohlberg, Etan. 2020. In Praise of the Few: Studies in Shiʿi Thought and History. Edited by Amin Ehteshami. Shii Islam: Texts and Studies 1, edited by Rula Abisaab, Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, Hassan Ansari, Robert Gleave, Tahera Qutbuddin, and Sabine Schmidtke. Leiden, NL: Brill.
Marrs, Daniel J. 2015. “To Become Transfigured: Reconstructing Søren Kierkegaard’s Christological Anthropology.” PhD diss., Baylor University. http://hdl.handle.net/2104/9311.
Meisami, Sayeh. 2018. Knowledge and Power in the Philosophies of Ḥamīd al-Dīn Kirmānī and Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī. n.p.: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ṅag-dbaṅ-kun-dgaʾ-bstan-ʾdzin, Khams-sprul III. 2020. The Royal Seal of Mahamudra. Vol. 2, The Supreme Complete Path of the Ocean of Profound Meaning, translated by Gerardo Abboud. Boulder: Snow Lion. EPUB.
Roberts, Bernadette. 1981. The Experience of No-Self: A Contemplative Journey. Sunspot, NM: Iroquois House.
———. (1985) 1991. The Path to No-Self: Life at the Center. Boston: Shambhala. Albany: State University of New York Press. Citations refer to State University of New York Press edition.
———. (1989) 2005. What is Self? A Study of the Spiritual Journey in Terms of Consciousness. Austin: Mary Botsford Goens. Boulder: Sentient Publications. Citations refer to Sentient Publications edition.
Strickmann, Michel. 1979. “On the Alchemy of T ’ao Hung-ching.” In Facets of Taoism: Essays in Chinese Religion, edited by Holmes Welch and Anna Seidel. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Thakchoe, Sonam. 2007. The Two Truths Debate: Tsongkhapa and Gorampa on the Middle Way. Foreword by Jay L. Garfield. Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Footnotes
- Pāḷi Tipiṭaka, Saṃyutta Nikāya 56:102–113. The translation is by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/SN/SN56_102.html.