This series has followed the path the contemplative traditions describe, from the first recognition that there is a knowledge by becoming, through the forgetting that hides it, the turning, the purification, the practice of attention and the darkness in which every handhold fails. This last essay asks what the traditions say lies at the end, and what happens afterwards. They speak of both with reluctance, because they hold that the end cannot be described from outside, and with insistence, because they hold that it is the point of everything else.
For Advaita Vedānta, the end is the discovery that nothing was ever separate. The Muṇḍaka Upaniṣad says that one who knows Brahman becomes Brahman (Müller 1884, Muṇḍaka III.2.9); Śaṅkara adds that “becomes” is a manner of speaking. Nothing is gained, as nothing was lost. The rope was never a snake, and the self was never anything but the one reality, without a second. Liberation is the end of a mistake, not the beginning of a new state, and so it can be had in this life: the sage who has seen through the mistake goes on living, acting and speaking, but no longer takes the body and mind for the self.
For most Christian, Jewish and Islamic contemplatives, and for the theistic schools of Vedānta, the end is union with God in which the creature remains a creature. Teresa of Ávila, describing the seventh and innermost dwelling of the soul, distinguishes two images. In the earlier union the soul and God are like two candles brought together so that their flames make one light, which can be separated again. In the spiritual marriage they are like rain falling into a river: the water can no longer be told apart, yet the rain did not cease to be water (Ávila, VII.2).
Ruusbroec, the Flemish contemplative, held both sides of the paradox at once: the soul is one with God without difference in the depth of its being, and yet remains distinct in the order of creation, as the eye is one with the light it sees without becoming the light (Ruusbroec 1916, The Sparkling Stone). Plotinus, whose language most of these writers inherited, spoke of the soul’s final ascent as the flight of the alone to the alone (Plotinus 1917, VI.9.11), a union so complete that the soul can hardly say afterwards that it saw, because there were no longer two.
For the Madhyamaka Buddhists, the end is not union with anything, because there is no ultimate thing to be united with. Nāgārjuna’s most startling verses say that there is not the slightest difference between nirvāṇa and the round of birth and death: the limit of the one is the limit of the other (Nāgārjuna, 25.19–20). Nirvāṇa is not a place elsewhere. It is this world seen without grasping, empty of the intrinsic natures that the deluded mind projects onto it. The Zen tradition, which inherited this teaching, speaks of the enlightened person drawing water and carrying firewood, exactly as before.
The Sufis described the end in two movements. In passing away (fanāʾ) the self is extinguished in God, so that the seeker no longer sees himself at all. But the great Sufi teachers did not stop there. In abiding (baqāʾ) the servant is restored to life, living now by God rather than by himself. Al-Hujwīrī, writing the first Persian treatise on Sufism, insists that the two belong together, and that passing away without abiding is incomplete (al-Hujwīrī 1911). Junayd of Baghdad, the master of the “sober” school, valued the return to clear consciousness above the ecstasy of the drunken.
The Daoist sage, finally, returns to the root, and becomes again the simple child, the infant who keeps the constant excellence.11 Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 28.1, translated by James Legge: “Who knows his manhood's strength, / Yet still his female feebleness maintains; / As to one channel flow the many drains, / All come to him, yea, all beneath the sky. / Thus he the constant excellence retains; / The simple child again, free from all stains. Who knows how white attracts, / Yet always keeps himself within black's shade, …” Read in context James Legge’s verse rendering of chapter 28. Kabīr, at the end of one of his longest songs, says that the inward and the outward have become one sky, the infinite and the finite are united, and he is drunk with the sight of the All (Kabīr 1915, XVII).
Set side by side, these accounts do not say the same thing, and it would betray them to pretend they do. Identity is not communion; emptiness is not God; passing away is not the rope seen as a rope. The traditions argued with one another about exactly these differences for centuries, and their arguments were not misunderstandings. A reader who wants to know what is finally real will not be able to settle the question by noting that everyone used the word “union”.
And yet the accounts share more than a word. In each, the separate self ceases to be the centre around which everything turns. In each, what remains is described as peace, freedom from fear, and a love that no longer seeks its own. In each, the one who has arrived is humbler than before, not prouder. And in each, the end is not an escape from the world but a new way of being in it. That last agreement is the subject of the rest of this essay.
Every tradition sends the one who arrives back. Plato’s prisoner, having climbed out of the cave and seen the sun, must go down again into the cave to help those still chained there, however unwelcome the return and however much the others mock him (Plato 1871, VII, 519d–520c). The Zen ox-herding pictures, which began with the search for the ox, end with the tenth: the sage entering the marketplace with open, helping hands. The Mahāyāna bodhisattva vows not to enter final nirvāṇa until every being is freed. The Sufi passes away in order to abide, and abides among people.
Teresa, describing the highest dwelling of the soul, insists that its fruit is works: Martha and Mary must go together, the active and the contemplative life joined, and a union that does not show itself in service is suspect (Ávila, VII.4). Tagore puts the same conviction in a single line: deliverance is not for him in renunciation; he feels the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight, and will never shut the doors of his senses.22 Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, poem 73, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight. Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine of various colours and fragrance, filling this earthen vessel to the brim. My world will light its hundred different lamps with thy flame and place them before the altar of …” Read in context Tagore’s translation of his own Gitanjali. And the Daodejing ends with a sage who does not accumulate: the more he spends for others, the more he has.33 Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 81.2, translated by James Legge: “The sage does not accumulate (for himself). The more that he expends for others, the more does he possess of his own; the more that he gives to others, the more does he have himself.” Read in context From the last chapter of the Tâo Teh King, in James Legge’s translation.
This is why the traditions judge claims to unitive knowledge by their fruits, as the first essay of this series said. Whatever is found at the summit, the evidence that it has been found is not a report of visions but a life: patient, generous, unafraid, attentive to others. The return is not an epilogue to the path. On the traditions’ own account, it is where the path shows what it was.
Since the end cannot be described from inside, the traditions often describe it from outside, by drawing the person in whom it has happened. Their portraits are strikingly alike. Paul lists the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.44 Galatians 5:22–23. The Buddhist tradition names four boundless states, sometimes called the divine abidings: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy in the joy of others, and equanimity, each extended without limit to all beings.
The Bhagavad Gītā gives the longest portrait, of the person of steady wisdom. Such a person has given up the desires of the mind and is content in the self alone; is undisturbed in sorrow and without longing in pleasure; is free of attachment, fear and anger; and withdraws the senses from their objects as a tortoise draws in its limbs (Vyāsa 1882, II.55–58). None of these portraits describes extraordinary powers or visions. They describe a character: steady, kind, unafraid, free from the need to be anyone in particular.
The portraits matter for two reasons. They give the seeker a way to recognize genuine teachers, and to be wary of those whose claims outrun their kindness. And they give the seeker a way to measure the path without measuring experiences. A person who after years of practice is more patient, more generous and less afraid has, by the traditions’ own standards, travelled further than one who has seen visions and is unchanged.
Several traditions refuse even the idea of a last stage. Gregory of Nyssa, the fourth-century Greek theologian, taught that because God is infinite, the soul’s ascent into God never ends: each attainment becomes the beginning of a further desire, and perfection itself consists in endless progress.55 Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, especially book II; the idea is often called epektasis, “straining forward”, after Philippians 3:13. Dōgen taught that practice does not stop at realization, because practice and realization are one; the awakened continue to sit. The Sufis speak of journeys after the journey to God: in God, and then back to creation with God.
These teachings guard against a last temptation, the wish to have arrived. On their account, union is not a possession and not a finish line, but a direction that deepens without end. That may be the most hopeful thing the traditions say about it. If there is no final arrival, there is also no point at which one is too late to begin.
A series like this one can describe the path; it cannot walk it for anyone. The traditions themselves give the same advice to every beginner, and it is worth repeating plainly.
Begin within a living tradition, not a collection of fragments from many. Every practice described in this series was developed in a community, with teachers who knew its dangers, and it does not travel well alone. Find a teacher or a community you can trust, and test them by their fruits. Begin with the ordinary life: honesty, kindness, simplicity, the purification that is available wherever one already is. Choose one practice of attention and keep to it daily, briefly and faithfully, rather than sampling many. Read the traditions’ own texts slowly, a page at a time; the Library and its reader exist to make that easier. Expect dryness and darkness, and do not take them for failure. And do not hurry. Every tradition measures the path in years, and most in lifetimes.
Notes
1.Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 28.1, translated by James Legge: “Who knows his manhood's strength, / Yet still his female feebleness maintains; / As to one channel flow the many drains, / All come to him, yea, all beneath the sky. / Thus he the constant excellence retains; / The simple child again, free from all stains. Who knows how white attracts, / Yet always keeps himself within black's shade, …” Read in context James Legge’s verse rendering of chapter 28. Back
2.Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, poem 73, translated by Rabindranath Tagore: “Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight. Thou ever pourest for me the fresh draught of thy wine of various colours and fragrance, filling this earthen vessel to the brim. My world will light its hundred different lamps with thy flame and place them before the altar of …” Read in context Tagore’s translation of his own Gitanjali. Back
3.Laozi, The Tâo Teh King, chapter 81.2, translated by James Legge: “The sage does not accumulate (for himself). The more that he expends for others, the more does he possess of his own; the more that he gives to others, the more does he have himself.” Read in context From the last chapter of the Tâo Teh King, in James Legge’s translation. Back