'Pointing Finger' to Creation being Finite but Creator being Infinite!

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The spirit of Zen has entered deeply into Chinese and Japanese art. In the late

T'ang dynasty they used to hold many national painting competitions in which a

theme was set and anyone was free to submit their picture on that theme. The

entries were judged by masters of the art. In one such competition the subject

set for the picture was 'Famous monastery in the mountains'. And more than a

thousand entries were received, many of which were works of art destined to be

admired as masterpieces for centuries afterwards. Hundreds of pictures were

produced showing monasteries against a background of mountain peaks, some in

sunlight some in shadow, some in summer, some in winter, some perched on

mountain peaks, some reflected in mountain lakes, but the winning picture had no

monastery at all. It simply represented a monk pausing and reflecting on a misty

mountain bridge. The greatness of the picture was that its subject was perfectly

suggested without being depicted. This is the real spirit of Zen, in which all

art is a pointing finger, so to speak, drawing attention to something beyond

what is contained in the concrete picture itself. The grain of sand as such is

trivial and unimportant, but it contains an element of infinity within itself.

 

It is the same, say the yogis, with each and every atom. As the finite name and

form, the object is almost nothing. Indeed, Shri Shankara's word for the

empirical world is 'tuccha', trivial or insignificant. But there is in addition

to the name and form the reality hidden in the heart of all beings and all

objects. It is the absolute, Sat Chit Ananda - Existence, Consciousness and

Bliss. William Blake has some very interesting words on the Last Judgement,

about which he noted down:

 

Error is created. Truth is eternal. Error, or Creation, will be burned up, and

then, and not till then, Truth or Eternity will appear. It is Burnt up the

Moment Men cease to behold it. I assert for My Self that I do not behold the

outward Creation and to me it is hindrance and not Action; it is as the Dirt

upon my feet, No part of Me. 'What', it will be question'd, 'When the Sun rises,

do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?' O no, no, I see an

Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying: 'Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord

God Almighty'. I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I

would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro' it and not with it.

 

In this passage Blake speaks almost like Shri Shankara in his disdain for the

outward appearances of things. Shri Shankara talks about the realm of name and

form being insignificant, 'tuccha'. Blake speaks of the outward Creation as

'like dirt upon my Feet, No part of Me'. But nonetheless we have to remember the

complementary effect, that each and every object is a partial manifestation of a

greater reality. Tennyson expressed this thought when he wrote:

 

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower - but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

 

You cannot know all about an object so long as you are examining it from the

outside. In standing at a distance from the object, to examine it objectively,

as the scientist does, you limit yourself to a particular aspect of it. You see

it only from our own point of view, and what you see is only one facet of the

object as it presents itself to you. In order to really understand the nature of

an object, you have to penetrate it. This is the whole principle of Yoga. By

meditating on any object, we enter into the inner reality of the object. And the

inner reality of each and every object is divine. 'O Arjuna, I am seated in the

hearts of all beings', says the Lord in the Gita.

 

The great German mystic Meister Eckhart wrote:

 

Thou shalt know him (God) without image, without semblance and without means -

'But for me to know God thus, with nothing between, I must be all but he, he all

but me.' - I say, God must be very I, I very God, so consummately one that this

he and this I are one 'is', in this is-ness working one work eternally; but so

long as this he and this I, to wit, God and the soul, are not one single here,

one single now, the I cannot work with nor be one with that he.

 

In other words, the spiritual reality can only be known through identification

in love, achieved through one-pointed meditation. This is not mediate but

immediate knowledge, not knowledge gained at a distance through the operation of

an instrument such as the eye or the ear. If we are at a distance, all we can

hope for is the pointing finger, the symbol of reality. To know reality as it is

we have to be one with it. And that means giving up dependence on the partial

knowledge. For, as St. Paul says, now we see as through a glass darkly, but then

face to face; now we know in part, but then we shall know, even as we are known.

 

There is an old Zen poem:

 

Searching Him took

My strength.

One night I bent

My pointing finger -

Never such a moon!

 

It is no good expecting the analysing, measuring technique of the scientist to

suddenly reveal reality to us. Its forte is in the sphere of relativity, in

analysing the relationship between one finite object and another. But

enlightenment will not come in this way. The Chinese Zen Master Ejo once asked

his pupil Baso why he spent so much time meditating. He replied: 'To become a

Buddha'. The Master picked up a brick and began rubbing it very hard. Baso was

puzzled and asked him: 'Why do you rub that brick?' ' To make a mirror,' the

Master said.

 

'But surely', said Baso, 'no amount of polishing will change a brick into a

mirror.'

 

'Just so,' said the Master. 'No amount of cross-legged sitting will make you

into a Buddha.'

 

If we do not use the right method in the first place, we cannot expect to

achieve success, however hard we try. It is only when we find the right way that

the search is successful and we achieve the knowledge which we seek. It is only

through meditation and awakening the inner eye, say the yogis, that we can know

the spiritual reality.

 

Sir Arthur Eddington has stressed in his lecture entitled The Nature of the

Physical World how the methods of science fail to give us any knowledge of the

spiritual dimension of reality. He says it is like a fisherman who goes out

trawling in the sea with a net in order to find out about the living creatures

in the sea. After a long series of investigations of the incidence and variety

of the sea creatures which he recovers, he concluded that all sea living animals

are at least an inch in diameter and that all of them have gills. Both

conclusions are of course wrong, but they follow from the data which he has

collected. The fact that all the sea creatures he finds are at least an inch in

diameter is simply a function of the size of the net which he is using to

collect them, and the fact that he concludes that all sea creatures have gills

is a consequence of the fact that it so happens that all those myriads of sea

creatures who do not have gills happen to be smaller than that and pass through

the holes in his net without being found. Eddington's simile is used to

emphasise that the methods we use to know something and investigate it

themselves may be subject to grave limitations.

 

It is the same point which Blake is making when he speaks about single vision

and Newton's sleep. If we rely on the objects as they appear to sense

experience, we shall miss the reality in the object, and we shall certainly miss

the spiritual dimension of the world. All we can expect to find in the empirical

world are fingers pointing to something beyond that world. In Training the Mind

Through Yoga Miss Waterhouse quotes Meister Eckhart's reply to the request of

the pupil: 'Show me the way to eternal happiness, my father.'

 

'Any creature will tell you that,' he says, 'with one accord they exclaim: " Pass

on, we are not God " . It is direction enough, my daughter.' The meaning is: 'Use

the world as a bridge; pass over it, but do not loiter on it.'

 

Man is continually mistaking the object of his desires. He sees the empirical

objects, and gets a glimpse of the bliss and reality hidden within them, and

then falls in love with the form of the object. But the form is evanescent. The

real object of his love should be the transcendent reality hidden within the

form.

 

As St. Augustine says in his Confessions:

 

Wheresoever the soul of man turns, it becomes enmeshed in grief, everywhere

except in thee (O Lord); yea, even if it dwells on beautiful objects, if they

are exterior to itself and to thee; for these arise and inevitably pass away,

and have their existence only in thee.

 

And he also says in a graphic phrase:

 

For they that find their joy in outward things, easily become vain and give

themselves up to the things which are seen and temporal, and with their famished

minds are fain to lick the empty images of these things. (Confessions IV.10)

 

Man tries to extract joy out of the sense objects, thinking the object itself to

be the source of that joy. He licks the empty images of the objects imagining

that he will enjoy the honey of existence which his soul desires. But the real

source of that bliss and satisfaction lies, not in the form of the object at

all, not in the perishable empirical part of the object, but in the spiritual

reality hidden within it. And when he worships the form, as it is seen with the

eye, rather than using the object as a pointing finger, a symbol of the

transcendent spirit within, he misses the true mark and becomes blinded by what

Blake calls 'single vision and Newton's sleep'. Let me remind you of the words

of Van Gogh again:

 

If you study Japanese art, you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic

and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the

earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a

single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant,

and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then

the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole.

 

There is yet a further stage than that spoken of by Van Gogh. An old Taoist sage

has said: 'Heaven and earth are one finger'. The whole of creation is, so to

speak, an object of study and worship through which we can rise to God. That

great master of Yoga, Swami Rama Tirtha, wrote:

 

What is an image which we worship? The root meaning of the Sanskrit word for

image 'pratima' is a unit of measurement. Thus every image is a unit by which we

measure God. In the Hindu religion even the sun and the moon are units of

measurement. In some instances, the Guru is considered as Brahman, and so forth.

 

When we use a small and insignificant image, does it mean that we reduce God to

insignificance? No. The use of such an image means that we are to mature the

vision of Brahman as being the real in all. If you can understand and see that a

small piece of stone is Brahman, then slowly the day will approach when the

whole world will appear to be Brahman. But if there is a man who worships with

the thought that the image itself is Brahman and nothing beyond it, then he is

not a true worshipper.

 

True worship means to negate the form, the name and the attributes of an object

and to concentrate on its existence and bliss, to lift the mind from the world

or sentence and to grasp the meaning. To be merged in God through a symbol is

worship. Should we always apply our worship to a symbol? No. We learn how to

write on a board, but when we have mastered the art of writing we can write

freely anywhere. If you have known the art of seeing Brahman, then you do not

need a symbol; you can see Brahman everywhere. The object of using the image or

symbol is that we may learn how to see Brahman everywhere. In the end the whole

world must become a temple, every object a glimpse of Rama, and every action

worship.

 

The pointing finger is a recurrent theme in the pictures of Leonardo da Vinci,

and for him, as for the Zen masters, it represents a symbol of the transcendent

region of the spirit to which the empirical image is only a pointer. Leonardo

was one of the first great scientists of the modern tradition. He died on May

2nd 1519 at the age of 67, a hundred and twenty-three years before Newton was

born. But, unlike Newton, Leonardo was also a universal genius, a supreme artist

and philosopher. His vision was fourfold [including the spiritual], and would

have been equally at home in the world of Blake as of Newton. At the age of 65

he went, at the invitation of Francis I, the 23-year-old King of France who had

just succeeded Louis XII two years before, to live close to the royal residence

at Amboise in the little manor house of Cloux. He was given the title of 'First

painter, architect and engineer to the King.'

 

Only one picture has survived from these last years of Leonardo's life. It is

the picture of St. John, portrayed as a mystic. It is a mysterious and haunting

picture of unworldly beauty, appearing as if in a vision and dominated by an

upturned arm and hand with the finger pointing upwards. Leonardo had used this

image once or twice before, although never to such powerful effect. In the Last

Supper, St. Thomas is painted in the same way. He is the disciple whom Leonardo

paints as closest to Christ, but it is also significant that he is withdrawn

from the scene into the background. He alone among the disciples, all of whom

are reacting to the saying of Jesus 'One of you is going to betray me', appears

as if his mind was elsewhere and unperturbed.' There are two other instances in

Leonardo's few surviving pictures, where he also uses the pointing finger as a

motif. One of them is The Madonna of the Rocks, although not the version in the

National Gallery of London, but the one in the Louvre. In this the angel on the

right of the picture points at the infant John who is worshipping the babe

Jesus. Again the gesture is associated with the worship of the transcendent

spiritual reality (symbolised by Jesus) by the soul (represented by John). The

other instance is in the National Gallery in the unfinished drawing of St. Anne

and the Virgin with Jesus and the child, which is one of the glories of that

collection. In the top right hand corner of the picture which Leonardo only

sketched in, St. Anne's hand can be seen in the same upward-pointing gesture as

in the later picture of St. John. It is again a testimony by Leonardo to the

fact that the empirical has its meaning and existence, not simply in itself, but

because of the higher spiritual reality, of which it is only a partial and

fragmentary manifestation.

 

Freedom through Self-Realisation

A.M. Halliday

A Shanti Sadan Publication - London

ISBN 0-85424-040-3

Pgs. 93-101