The Absolute One

I propose the reading of four passages, in my very bad translation into English from Italian – therefore a triple translation – which however I hope has kept the original meaning at the expense of beauty. 

First:

“What is invisible, incomprehensible,
uncaused, unqualified;
which has no eyes and ears;
feet and hands;
which is eternal,
all penetrating, very subtle
and of infinite manifestations;
is That immortal
that the wise recognize
like the beginning
of all creation.”

“The eye can't get near it,
neither the voice nor the mind.
We don't know Him,
nor can we describe it.
It is different from any known
and beyond any unknown.
So we learned from the elders
who taught us.”

Second:

“You are a copy of the Holy Book of God,
you are the mirror of the supreme Beauty of the King.
All that is in the world is not outside you
whatever you want, look for it in you. You are that.
They said: 'Everywhere is the light of God'.
But the men all shout: 'Where is that light?'.
The ignorant look everywhere, right, left;
but a Voice says: 'Look only, without right and left!' ”.

Third:

“Know that the world all around is a mirror,
and in every atom are found a hundred flaming suns.
If you split the heart of a single drop of water,
a hundred pure oceans flow from it.
A universe is hidden in a millet seed;
everything is gathered in the point of the present...
From every point of that circle
shapes are drawn by the thousands.
And each point, as it rotates in a circle,
it is now a circle, now a turning circumference.”

Fourth:

“The name of God purifies
the mirror of the human soul,
makes the ocean grow bigger and bigger
of divine bliss.
Each syllable in the chant of the name
makes you taste the fullness of the nectar of eternity.”

Well, the four passages are taken from Islamic and Hindu texts, two for each of the two religions. Now try to read them again and figure out which ones relate to Islam and which to Hinduism.

The first song is verses from Mundaka and Kena Upanishad, the second is a selection of verses from two poems by the great Gialal Al-Din Rumi, the third is a wonderful poem by Mahmud Shabestani, a Sufi poet born and lived in Iran where he died in 1320. The last is a Gaudiya Vaishnava prayer in Sanskrit from the 16th century of which only the verses of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1686-1534) remain.

While it's easy to associate Islam with the two great Christian and Jewish monotheistic religions (tauhid), widely cited and respected in the Koran, Hinduism has always been kept at a safe distance with its unsurpassed polytheism.

Yet if you manage to see beyond the kaleidoscopic plethora of deities that animate the surface of this very ancient religion, you can become aware of a non-hazardous proximity.

Already reading the verses quoted above, without knowing their origin, I think it can make you think. That final confusion is a sign that the granite certainty of the incompatibility between the two religions is more prejudicial than substantial.

The Quran first came down to the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) during Ramadan, in the year 610, while he was meditating in the cave of Mount Hira, as it is written in the first sura – in chronological order not in the one indexed in the chapters of the Quran – “Al-'Alaq”. The first word of the angel Gabriel was “Iqra!”, “Read!”, repeated three times, to convince the Prophet (SAW) shocked and frightened by the apparition. Since then, for twenty-three years, he spread the Koranic revelation to his disciples and dictated it to his secretaries.

It should be noted that the term “Read!” it was actually “Listen” because the Prophet (SAW) was illiterate and this was also proof of the truthfulness of the revelation and of the destiny of the chosen one since it was impossible for an illiterate person to compose verses of sublime beauty, depth and stylistic richness.

The word could therefore only be divine and was listened to and then shared.

Even the Vedas (“Knowledge” in Sanskrit) are for Hindus the heard Word of the Divine. In fact, Hindu religious literature is divided into two categories of different sacred values: sruti (listening) and smriti (memory).

The sruti, from sru – to hear – includes the Vedas, or the divine word heard by the seers at the dawn of humanity, with the oldest texts dating back to 1000 BC. up to the Upanishads, from 800 BC.

The smriti, on the other hand, collects the religious truth that comes into contact with the spiritual teachers who remember and transmit it for generations: the Sutras, the books of the Law, the Puranas, plus the two most famous epic works, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavad-Gita is a part of it.

The Vedas, unlike the Koran or the Bible, is not a single book but a huge religious literature that has arisen over the centuries.

In reality, if one follows the Vedic readings, or in any case those pertaining to the divine word sruti, one understands how even in Hinduism everything can be traced back to a single essence, the Absolute One, divine and creator which is Brahman, beyond which all is nama-rupa: names and forms.

“He who is one, the wise invoke him under various names”: it is one of the most famous verses of the Rig-Veda.

And as the absolute Creator, it's impossible to describe or know Him with the senses and mind, He has no attributes.

“Allah is Unique, Allah is the Absolute. He did not generate, He was not generated and no one is equal to Him”, reads the sura “Al-Ikhlas” dedicated to Islamic monotheism.

Brahman, in Sanskrit, means the force of growth, expansion, and development and sacred Enigma, from which derives Bhrami who is the divinity of the Word. The Absolute, which in the masculine becomes Brahma, the creator God of the Hindu Trimurti: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.

This divine essence, which should not be confused with one of the three divinities as the Sanskrit root reveals, communicates directly with the soul, the Self – the Atman – to which the believer reaches through deep meditation, the search for the dissolution of his imperfect nature in divine Perfection.

The search for the connection with the divine is sought by the Sufi dervishes through the circular and hypnotic dance that takes them into a trance, to distance them from the phenomenal world.

It is no coincidence that even in Hinduism the faithful, before entering the temples, go around the structure before accessing the sacred part, a rite called pradakshina, or external circumambulation, which “enables the body to participate in that journey of consciousness which, discovering itself in the multiplicity of manifestations of being, it reintegrates little by little in the motionless clarity of the One-All” (Tiziana Lorenzetti).

“This god
on this land of a hundred songs
three times
in the greatness of him, he took the step ”.
It is written about Vishnu in the Rig-Veda.

Furthermore, the same use of the metaphor of the heart as a mirror that is recurrent in Sufi literature is incredible, first of all, Ghazali, the greatest philosophical and poetic exponent of Sufism united the human heart with a mirror clouded and oxidized by rust.

Chaitanya wrote in 1500 about the power of pronouncing the name of God (dhikr in Islam) for the purification of the mirror of the human soul just as Rumi, 300 years earlier, wrote that to have a pure mirror one had to contemplate within oneself and, only then, the mirror would have received any form.

It is the pure heart of man that becomes the reflection of the Beauty of the divine.

As in Hindu practice, only by getting rid of desire and selfishness can we free ourselves from the spiritual ignorance that causes suffering and the eternal cycle of rebirth (samsara).

Ignorance is also related to the senses which make man unable to see the true essence. Again the concept is common.

In Islam, it is symbolized by the “veil” of individuality which acts as a screen, a curtain – hijab.

Revelation is the opening of the veil, and the carnal soul (nafs) is the veil par excellence since it's a slave to appearances, to the ephemeral, and to forms.

For the Sufis, existence is a veil, and as the Prophet (SAW) says, God Himself hides behind seventy thousand veils of light and darkness.

In Hinduism, the veil of illusions is that of Maya, who creates real forms, and orders them but also creates illusions: the creative power (sakti) explicated by Brahman through which it manifests, in an illusory way, the phenomenal world. In the West, the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer spoke about it.

“You will never escape your 'I' (nafs) before you kill it,” says Abu Sa'id ibn Abi-l-Khayr about God's gift that opens the door of love (mahabba) in those who believe.

Atman, which is the individual soul and the Self has in the Sanskrit etymology AN, the blow, and ANA, the breath, from which Vayu, the wind derives.

Nafs is an Arabic term used in the Koran for “self”, but it is also translatable as “Ego” or “soul”, which derives from the word nafas: to breathe.

It is interesting to note that the term nafs, referring to “soul”, is also often confused with ruh which means breath or wind.

Atman and Nafs.

Finally, I want to mention the mystical literature between the 7th and 9th centuries after Christ.

That Vishnuitic bhakti, which has its greatest exponents in the Nayanars, the Tamil “Shaivites saints” of southern India, and the mystic Vishnuites Alvar.

Their faith was directed only to God, beyond any social practice or status, even anti-caste, which at the time was almost a sacrilege.

“But if they love Shiva,
who hides the river Ganges in his hair,
so whoever they are,
filthy lepers, or pariah,
and even cow killers,
to them goes my homage,
they are gods to me.”
Appar, a Shivaite mystic, writes in the VIII after Christ.

 

Of course, these are just suggestions.

It is absolutely not my intention to equate Islam with Hinduism, I'm not stupid.

For many the Hindu will always be the one who worships different deities, millions.

It's no coincidence that Hinduism is referred to as henotheism, or the exaltation of the supreme position of any deity when it is praised, which in Islam is one of the most serious sins (shirk).

I wanted to try to make people understand how, going back to the source, even in the most original and ancestral Hinduism there is the search for the Absolute One, the Creator without attributes who gives origin and form to everything, even the innumerable divinities who inhabit the world of heavens and of the earth.

I believe that distrust always pushes away.

But it can also become a strength, because only when you are distant can you better see the outlines of what we want to try to understand.

The spiritual search of human beings crosses different lands and often travels miles away but the destination is always the hope of being able to find the divine within one's heart.

“My heart is capable of welcoming all forms:
it is a meadow where the gazelle swarms,
the monastery where the monk prays.
For every idol it is a temple, for the pilgrim, it is the Kaba,
it is the table of the Torah, it is the book of the Koran.
I profess the religion of love:
wherever it leads travelers,
there I am a pilgrim.
Because love is my religion,
my only faith”.
Ibn 'Arabi (Andalusia - Syria, 1164-1240)

Two books were essential for this article:
Mariasusai Dhavamony: “The light of God in Hinduism - Prayers, hymns, songs and meditations of the Hindus” (Edizioni Paoline, 1987)
“The Mystics of Islam. Anthology of Sufism” edited by Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch (Guanda, 1991)

Colette Poggi: “Sanskrit - A language for the thought of the world” (Mediterranee, 2014)
“Poetry of Islam” edited by Gianroberto Scarcia (Sellerio Editore Palermo, 2004)
Rumi: “Mystical Poems” edited by Alessandro Bausani (BUR, 1998)
Tiziana Lorenzetti: “The Hindu temple. Structure and symbols” (ISIAO, 2007)
Diego Manzi: “Enchantment. The goddesses of India” (Le Lettere, 2019)

Italian version