human beings' relation to that
which they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual, or divine. Religion is
commonly regarded as consisting of a person's relation to God or to
gods or spirits. Worship is probably the most basic element of religion, but
moral conduct, right belief, and participation in religious institutions are
generally also constituent elements of the religious life as practiced by
believers and worshipers and as commanded by religious sages and scriptures.
Phenomenology of religion
The material with which phenomenology is concerned is all
the different types of religious thinking and action, ideas about divinity, and
cultic acts. Kristensen's systematic organization of religious phenomena may be
seen in the table of contents of his Meaning of Religion in which
he divides his presentation of material into discussions of (1) cosmology,
which includes worship of nature in the form of sky and earth deities, animal
worship, totemism, and animism, (2) anthropology, made up of a variety of considerations
on the nature of man, his life, and his associations in society, (3) cultus,
which involves consideration of sacred places, sacred times, and sacred images,
and (4) cultic acts, such as prayer, oaths and curses, and ordeals. Kristensen
was not concerned with the historical development or the description of a
particular religion or even a series of religions but rather with
grouping the typical elements of the entire religious life, irrespective of the
community in which they might occur.
Probably the best known phenomenologist is G.
van der Leeuw, another Dutch scholar. In his Religion
in Essence and Manifestation, van der Leeuw categorized the material of
religious life under the following headings: (1) the object of religion,
or that which evokes the religious response, (2) the subject of religion,
in which there are three divisions: the sacred man, the sacred community, and
the sacred within man, or the soul, (3) object and subject in their reciprocal
operation as outward reaction and inward action, (4) the world, ways to the
world, and the goals of the world, and (5) forms, which must take into account
religions and the founders of religions. Van der Leeuw was not interested in
grouping religious communities as such but rather in laying out the types of
religious expression. He discussed distinct religions only because religion
in the abstract has no existence. He classified religions according to 12
forms: (1) religion of remoteness and flight (ancient China and
18th-century deism), (2) religion of struggle (Zoroastrianism), (3) religion
of repose, which has no specific historical form but is found in every religion
in the form of mysticism, (4) religion of unrest or theism, which again
has no specific form but is found in many religions, (5) dynamic of religions
in relation to other religions (syncretism and missions), (6) dynamic of
religions in terms of internal developments (revivals and reformations), (7) religion
of strain and form, the first that van der Leeuw characterizes as one of the
"great" forms of religion (Greece), (8) religion of
infinity and of asceticism (Indian religions but excluding Buddhism), (9) religion
of nothingness and compassion (Buddhism), (10) religion of will and of
obedience (Israel), (11) the religion of majesty and humility (Islam),
and (12) the religion of love (Christianity). The above is not a
classification of religions as organized systems. Categories 3, 4, 5, and 6
relate to elements found in many if not all historical religious communities,
and the categories from 7 onward are not classifications but attempts to
characterize particular communities by short phrases that express what van der
Leeuw considered to be their essential spirit. The "primitive"
religions of less-developed peoples are not classified.
Hegel
classified religions according to the role that they have played in the
self-realization of Spirit.
The historical religions fall into three great divisions, corresponding with
the stages of the dialectical progression. At the lowest level of development,
according to Hegel, are the religions of nature, or religions based principally
upon the immediate consciousness deriving from sense experience. They include:
immediate religion or magic at the lowest level; religions, such as
those of China and India plus Buddhism, that represent a division of consciousness
within itself; and others, such as the religions of ancient Persia, Syria, and
Egypt, that form a transition to the next type. At an intermediate level are
the religions of spiritual individuality, among which Hegel placed Judaism
(the religion of sublimity), ancient Greek
religion (the religion of beauty), and ancient Roman
religion (the religion of utility). At the highest level is
absolute religion, or the religion of complete spirituality,
which Hegel identified with Christianity. The progression thus proceeds from
man immersed in nature and functioning only at the level of sensual
consciousness, to man becoming conscious of himself in his individuality as
distinct from nature, and beyond that to a grand awareness in which the
opposition of individuality and nature is overcome in the realization of
Absolute Spirit.
Many criticisms have been offered of Hegel's
classification. An immediately noticeable shortcoming is the failure to make a
place for Islam, one of the major historical religious communities. The
classification is also questionable for its assumption of continuous
development in history. The notion of perpetual progress is not only doubtful
in itself but is also compromised as a principle of classification because of
its value implications.
Nevertheless, Hegel's scheme was influential and was
adapted and modified by a generation of philosophers of religion in the
Idealist tradition. Departure from Hegel's scheme, however, may be seen in the
works of Otto
Pfleiderer, a German theologian of the 19th century. Pfleiderer believed it
impossible to achieve a significant grouping of religions unless, as a
necessary preliminary condition, the essence
of religion were first isolated and clearly understood. Essence is a
philosophical concept, however, not a historical one. Pfleiderer considered it
indispensable to have conceptual clarity about the underlying and underived
basis of religion from which all else in religious life follows. In Die
Religion, ihr Wesen und ihre Geschichte ("Religion, Its
Essence and History"), Pfleiderer held that the essence of religious
consciousness exhibits two elements, or moments, perpetually in tension with
one another: one of freedom and one of dependence, with a number of different
kinds of relationships between these two. One or the other may predominate, or
they may be mixed in varying degrees.
Pfleiderer derived his classification of religions from
the relationships between these basic elements. He distinguished one great
group of religions that exhibits extreme partiality for one over against the
other. The religions in which the sense of dependence is virtually exclusive
are those of the ancient Semites, the Egyptians, and the Chinese.
Opposite these are the early Indian, Germanic, and Greek and Roman religions,
in which the sense of freedom prevails. The religion of this group may
also be seen in a different way, as nature religions in the less-developed
cultures or as culture or humanitarian religions in the more advanced. A second
group of religions exhibits a recognition of both elements of religion,
but gives them unequal value. These religions are called supernatural
religions. Among them Zoroastrianism gives more weight to freedom as a factor
in its piety, and Brahmanism and Buddhism are judged to have a stronger sense
of dependence. The last group of religions is the monotheistic religions:
Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, which are divided again into two sub-groups, i.e.,
those that achieve an exact balance of the elements of religion and
those that achieve a blending and merging of the elements. Both Judaism and
Islam grant the importance of the two poles of piety, though there is a slight
tendency in Islam toward the element of dependence and in Judaism toward
freedom. It is Christianity alone, he claimed, that accomplishes the blending
of the two, realizing both together in their fullness, the one through the
other.
The intellectual heritage that lies behind this
classification will be immediately apparent. The classification reflects its
time (19th century) and place (western Europe) of conception in the sense that
the study of religion was not yet liberated from its ties to the
philosophy of religion and theology.
An acceptable
definition of religion itself is difficult to attain. Attempts have been
made to find an essential ingredient in all religions (e.g., the
numinous, or spiritual, experience; the contrast between the sacred and the
profane; belief in gods or in God), so that an "essence" of religion
can be described. But objections have been brought against such attempts,
either because the rich variety of men's religions makes it possible to find
counterexamples or because the element cited as essential is in some religions
peripheral. The gods play a very subsidiary role, for example, in most phases
of Theravada
("Way of the Elders") Buddhism. A more promising method would seem to
be that of exhibiting aspects of religion that are typical of
religions, though they may not by universal. The occurrence of the rituals
of worship is typical, but there are cases, however, in which such rituals are
not central. Thus, one of the tasks of a student of religion
is to gather together an inventory of types of religious phenomena.
The fact that
there is dispute over the possibility of finding an essence of religion
means that there is likewise a problem about speaking of the study of religion
or of religions, for it is misleading to think of religion as something
that "runs through" religions. This brings to light one of the major
questions of method in the study of the subject. In practice, a religion
is a particular system, or a set of systems, in which doctrines, myths,
rituals, sentiments, institutions, and other similar elements are
interconnected. Thus, in order to understand a given belief that occurs
in such a system, it is necessary to look at its particular context--that is,
other beliefs held in the system, rituals, and other aspects. Belief in the
lordship of Christ in the early Christian Church, for example, has to be seen
in the context of a belief in the Creator and of the sacramental life of the
community. This systematic character of a religion has been referred to
by the 20th-century Dutch theologian Hendrik Kraemer as
"totalitarian"; but a better term would be "organic." Thus,
there arises the problem of whether or not one belief or practice embedded in
an organic system can properly be compared to a similar item in another organic
system. To put the matter in another way, every religion has its unique
properties, and attempts to make interreligious comparisons may hide these
unique aspects. Most students of religion agree, however, that valid
comparisons are possible, though they are difficult to make. Indeed, one can
see the very uniqueness of a religion through comparison, which includes
a contrast. The importance of setting religions side by side is why the study
of religions is sometimes referred to as the "comparative study of religion"--though
a number of scholars prefer not to use this phrase, partly because some
comparative work in the past has incorporated value judgments about other
religions.
But even if an
inventory of types of belief and practices can be gathered--so as to provide a
typical profile of what counts as religion--the absence of a tight
definition means that there will always be a number of cases about which it is
difficult to decide. Thus, some ideologies, such as Soviet Marxism, Maoism, and
Fascism, may have analogies to religion. Certain attempts at an
essentialist definition of religion, such as that of the German-American
theologian Paul
Tillich (1886-1965), who defined religion in terms of man's ultimate
concern, would leave the way open to count these ideologies as proper objects of
the study of religion. Tillich, incidentally, calls them
"quasi-religions." Though there is no consensus on this point among
scholars, it is not unreasonable to hold that the frontier between traditional
religions and modern ideologies represents one part of the field to be studied.
The phenomenologist of religion who probably has
had the greatest influence after Otto, partly because he is fairly explicit
about method, is Gerardus
van der Leeuw (1890-1950), who was somewhat influenced by the French
anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) and his notion of prelogical
mentality, which he applied to primitive cultures to distinguish them from
civilized cultures. Van der Leeuw emphasized power as being the basic religious
conception. His major work, Religion
in Essence and Manifestation, is an ambitious and wide-ranging
typology of religious phenomena, including the kinds of sacrifice, types of
holy men, categories of religious experience, and other types of
religious phenomena. The work has been criticized, however, as being
unhistorical. Partly because of his philosophical presuppositions, borrowed
chiefly from Husserl, van der Leeuw held the disputable doctrine that
Phenomenology knows nothing of the historical development of religion:
it picks out timeless essences of religious phenomena. Apparently it is not
necessary, however, to hold this doctrine, since one could as well classify
types of religious change (i.e., temporal sequences), as indeed Max
Weber attempted to do. Classificatory and historical techniques and conclusions
are not incompatible, however. Thus, the work of Nathan Söderblom, who, as well
as being a historian of religions, was prominent in the ecumenical movement,
combined the two aspects in his Living God.
If theology
explicates the way in which the believer understands his faith--or, if faith is
not a dominating quality, the way in which a religion's practitioners
understand their religion--this implies that it claims to be normative,
even if the claim does not, as in Hinduism
and Buddhism, culminate in the pretention to be absolutely authoritative.
The normative element in these religions arises simply out of the
authority of a divine teacher, or a revelation
(e.g., a vision or auditory revelation), or of any other kind of spiritual
encounter over against which one feels committed. The newly evolving
discipline of the history of religions, which encompasses also religious
psychology, religious sociology, and religious phenomenology as well as
philosophy of religion, has emancipated itself from the normative aspect
in favour of a purely empirical
analysis. This empirical aspect, which corresponds to the modern conception of
science, can be applied only if it functions on the basis of objectifiable
(empirically verifiable) entities. Revelation of the kind of event that would
have to be characterized as transcendent, however, can never be understood as
such an objectifiable entity. Only those forms of religious life that are positive
and arise out of experience can be objectified. Wherever such forms are given,
the religious man is taken as the source of the religious phenomena that are to
be interpreted. Understood in this manner, the history of religions represents
a necessary step in the process of secularization. Nevertheless, it cannot be
said that theology and the history of religions only contradict one another.
The "theologies"--for want of a better term--of the various religions
are concerned with religious phenomena, and the adherents of the religions of
the more advanced cultures are themselves constrained--especially at a time of
increasing cultural interdependency--to take cognizance of and to interpret
theologically the fact that besides their own religion there are many
others. In this regard, then, there are not only analytical but also
theological statements concerning religious phenomena, particularly in regard
to the manner in which such statements are encountered in specific primitive or
high religions. Thus, the objects of the history of religions and those of
theology cannot be clearly separated. They are merely approached with different
categories and criteria. If the history of religions does not surrender its
neutrality, since such a surrender would thereby reduce the discipline to
anthropology in an ideological sense (e.g., religion understood
as mere projection of the psyche or of societal conditions), theology will
recognize the history of religions as a science providing valuable material and
as one of the sciences in the universe of sciences.
Yoga
Sanskrit: "Yoking," or "Union"),
one of the six orthodox systems (darshans) of Indian philosophy. Its
influence has been widespread among many other schools of Indian thought. Its
basic text is the Yoga-sutras by Patañjali (c.
2nd century BC?).
The practical aspects of Yoga play a more
important part than does its intellectual content, which is largely based on
the philosophy of Samkhya
, with the exception that Yoga assumes the existence of God, who is the model
for the aspirant to spiritual release. Yoga holds with Samkhya
that the achievement of spiritual liberation occurs when the self (purusha) is
freed from the bondages of matter (prakriti) that have resulted because of
ignorance and illusion. The Samkhya view of the evolution of the world
through identifiable stages leads Yoga to an attempt to reverse this
order, as it were, so that a person can increasingly dephenomenalize himself
until the self reenters its original state of purity and consciousness. Once
the aspirant has learned to control and suppress the obscuring mental
activities of his mind and has succeeded in ending his attachment to material
objects, he will be able to enter samadhi--i.e., a state of deep
concentration that results in a blissful, ecstatic union with the ultimate
reality.
Generally the Yoga process is described in eight
stages (astanga-yoga, "eight-membered Yoga").
The first two stages are ethical preparations. They are yama
("restraint"), which denotes abstinence from injury (ahimsa),
falsehood, stealing, lust, and avarice; and niyama
("observance"), which denotes cleanliness of body, contentment,
austerity, study, and devotion to God.
The next two stages are physical preparations. Asana
("seat"), a series of exercises in physical posture, is intended to
condition the aspirant's body and make it supple, flexible, and healthy.
Mastery of the asanas is reckoned by one's ability to hold one of the
prescribed postures for an extended period of time without involuntary movement
or physical distractions. Pranayama
("breath control") is a series of exercises intended to stabilize the
rhythm of breathing in order to encourage complete respiratory relaxation.
The fifth stage, pratyahara
("withdrawal"), involves control of the senses, or the ability to
withdraw the attention of the senses from outward objects to the mind.
The first five stages are called external aids to Yoga;
the remaining three are purely mental or internal aids. Dharana
("holding on") is the ability to hold and confine awareness of
externals to one object for a long period of time (a common exercise is fixing
the mind on an object of meditation, such as the tip of the nose or an image of
the deity). Dhyana
("concentrated meditation") is the uninterrupted contemplation of the
object of meditation, beyond any memory of ego. Samadhi
("self-collectedness") is the final stage and is a precondition of
attaining release from the cycle of rebirth. In this stage the meditator
perceives or experiences the object of his meditation and himself as one.
The prehistory of Yoga is not clear. The
early Vedic texts speak of ecstatics, who may well have been predecessors of
the later yogis (followers of Yoga). Although Yoga has been made
into a separate school (darshana), its influence and many of its
practices have been felt in other schools.
In the course of time, certain stages of Yoga
became ends in themselves, notably, the breathing exercises and sitting
postures, as in the Yoga school of Hatha
Yoga. Patañjali's Yoga is sometimes known as Raja
("Royal") Yoga, to distinguish it from the other schools.
Yoga, in a less technical sense of achieving
union with God, is also used, as in the epic poem the Bhagavadgita, to
distinguish the alternate paths (margas) to such a union.
In the 20th century, the philosophy and practice of Yoga
became increasingly popular in the West. The first important organization for
practitioners in the United States was the Self-Realization
Fellowship, founded by Paramahansa
Yogananda in 1920. Some 50 years later, instruction emphasizing both the
physical and spiritual benefits of Yogic techniques was available through a
wide variety of sectarian Yoga organizations, nonsectarian classes, and
television programs in the United States and Europe.
Hatha yoga
(Sanskrit: "Union of Force"), a school of Indian
philosophy that stresses mastery of the body as a way of attaining spiritual
perfection. It is an outgrowth of the Yoga school
of Indian philosophy. Hatha Yoga traces its origins to
Gorakhnath, the legendary 12th-century founder of the Kanphata Yogis.
Hatha Yoga places great importance on
purificatory processes, regulation of breathing (pranayama),
and the adoption of bodily postures called asanas.
A common asana is the padmasana
("lotus posture"), in which the crossed feet rest on the opposite
thighs. This is the position in which many Hindu and Buddhist gods are often
depicted.
Hatha Yoga has grown in popularity in the
West as a form of exercise and relaxation. Western physiologists and
psychologists have also become interested in it and in related forms of Yoga
that focus on the control of bodily processes. Adept Yoga practitioners
have shown remarkable abilities to lower their own blood pressure and to
regulate body temperature and respiration rate.
The one
religious consequence of the Samkhya-Yoga is an emphasis on
austere asceticism and a turning away from the ritualistic elements of Hinduism
deriving from the Brahmanical sources. Though they continue to remain as
an integral part of the Hindu faith, no major religious order thrived on the
basis of these philosophies.
from
Indian philosophy
In the Yoga-sutras,
God is defined as a distinct self (purusa), untouched by
sufferings, actions, and their effects; his existence is proved on the ground
that the degrees of knowledge found in finite beings, in an ascending order,
has an upper limit--i.e., omniscience, which is what characterizes God.
He is said to be the source of all secular and scriptural traditions; he both
revealed the Vedas and taught the first fathers of mankind. Surrender of the
effects of action to God is regarded as a recommended observance.
As in Samkhya,
the self is distinguished from the mind
(citta):
the mind is viewed as an object, an aggregate. This argument is used to prove
the existence of a self other than the mind. The mental state is not
self-intimating; it is known in introspection. It cannot know both itself and
its object. It rather is known by the self, whose essence is pure, undefiled
consciousness. That the self is not changeable is proved by the fact that were
it changeable the mental states would be sometimes known and sometimes
unknown--which, however, is not the case, because a mental state is always
known. To say that the self knows means that the self is reflected in the
mental state and makes the latter manifested. The aim of Yoga is to
arrest mental modifications (citta-vrtti) so that the self
remains in its true, undefiled essence and is, thus, not subject to suffering.
The attitude
of the Yoga-sutras to the human body is ambivalent.
The body is said to be filthy and unclean. Thus, the ascetic cultivates a
disgust for it. Yet, much of the discipline laid down in the Yoga-sutras
concerns perfection of the body, with the intent to make it a fit instrument
for spiritual perfection. Steadiness in bodily posture and control of the
breathing process are accorded a high place. The perfection of body is said to
consist in "beauty, grace, strength and adamantine hardness."
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