Sufis and Indian Schools (II)

SUFISM AND THE INDIAN PHILOSOPHIES (cont'd)
By Sirdar Ikbal Ali Shah

In Western countries, books on Oriental religion

and philosophy, many of them of a more or less "occult"

nature, are appearing in increasing numbers. A second

major aggregation of books is concerned with psychology.

Western man is facing the crisis of trying to replace

his failing religious values with a personality which

shall give meaning and purpose to his life. Personality,

that much misused word, is derived from the Latin word

persona which signifies "A Mask"; a mask worn during

a stage play, with the intention of conveying to the

audience something of the character portrayed by

the actor. In the East the personality is very far

from a mask. It is the external view of what actually

is inside the man. The objective of practical philosophy

of the Sufi and Indian schools is an inner

transformation.

The diffusion of this sense of the integrated

personality during the period from the Middle Ages

until the present day has been a joint undertaking

of the Sufi and Indian schools of philosophical

thought and action. This task, the methodology and

results of which are abundantly plain in recorded

material, has been carried out in an atmosphere of

struggle. What has this struggle been?

Western philosophy, upon which depend many

of the lines of thinking of the past two centuries,

is built partly upon Greek and Roman philosophy.

In the form in which this philosophy reached the

West, the odds were heavily weighted in favour of

pure speculation and juggling with words. In the

process of transmission of the knowledge of the

ancients to the West, a very curious thing happened.

In the teachings of Pythagoras and Plato, there is

indeed a concentration upon the intellect. But

it is only this one portion which appears in books.

Equating the teachings of the Western classical

world with those of the East will show that the

intellectual exercises which pass for philosophy

are only a part of the picture. The important part -

the actual practice of self-cultivation has been

left out. It survives in the Sufi and Indian systems.

Take the classic syllogism of logic: "Man is a

liar. I am a man. Therefore, I am a liar. Therefore,

when I say 'Man is a liar' I am lying. Therefore,

man is not a liar."

The fallacy is, of course, that the statement

'Man is a liar' does not need to apply to every

situation. This is all very well - as far as it goes.

But it does not go far enough. The purpose of introducing

such ideas into the mind, practised by all

initiatory schools is not to exercise your wits but

to point to the limitations of language. Man cannot,

in the final analysis, rely upon words in order to

arrive at truth.

So the books of the Greeks were not fully

understood. They are still not understood, and people

play with them; like the child who has a book of

problems and no answers. The philosophy which we

share, the practical wedded to the theoretical, is

something of greater completion than the speculative

or rhetorical which has passed for philosophy in the

West.

People like Aldous Huxley in America are now

feeling their way towards an understanding of experiential

philosophy, as opposed to verbal juggling.

Their books seem rather negative, tentative and incomplete.

But the movement has started. They turn

their attention, interestingly enough, towards two

main fields for further support of their feeling

that there is something within man which awaits

realisation and is the ultimate source of truth -

Sufism and Indian philosophy. Zen Buddhism, now in

vogue in the West, is an offshoot of Buddhism - in

other words, the Chinese (Ch'an) and Japanese form

of a school of Indian thought. There is a movement

in the West which looks towards the Vedantic ways

of thought, for the same reason. The influence of

the Sufis upon every branch of Western thought has

been immense and continuous. Nietzsche of Germany

quotes Hafiz as the one who really knows and

experiences. Goethe's work is soaked in Sufism.

And even the Christian Saint John of the Cross

has been found by Professor Palacios to have taken

his ideas and many of his quotations direct from

the Illuminist School (The Ishraquiyya) of the

Sufis, as represented by Ibn Arabi and today the

Shadhiliyya of North Africa.

However, philosophical movements in the West

which are based upon Eastern models rapidly turn

away from the main theme: that of self-realisation.

There is only one reason for this. No school of

human study can survive entirely by means of

theory or the printed page. The continuous and

repeated refreshment of Indian and Sufi teaching has come

about and been maintained only because there has been

a perennial succession of teachers, masters, those who

knew how to carry the disciple from one stage to the

next in this mission of self-realisation.

I have purposely avoided invoking the technical

terms and dogmas which from time to time coalesce

around teaching schools and make them appear different

from other schools. I have done this deliberately,

because the essence of initiatory knowledge,

for the Indian schools and the Sufis alike, has always

been their common denominator: the search for truth

through a blending of theory and practice. I have

set myself the task of explaining what the mediocre

scholastics have made a dreary and footnote-loaded

task, by means of ideas and references which are

easily grasped by all. For if there is to be any

reality in self-development, that reality must ultimately

be a simplicity, not a multiplicity. As one of the

sages has put it, "Unity underlies all multiplicity".

Your attention is only confused by a thousand coloured

sweets, if what you are trying to understand is sugar,

and not the sweets individually. This sense of unity,

and the final unification of experience, is central

to the two initiatory schools of which Yoga and Sufism

are expressions.

What of methodology? How do we go about the

applying of the teaching of self-realisation and

unification? We cannot measure in terms of human

advantage the effect upon countless millions of people

of a succession of teachers of the self-development

schools throughout the milennia. The general effect

has been there to which we may ascribe that 'difference',

that ascendancy, which the East has over the West in

terms of the power of the human spirit, the composure

of the personality. And we disregard it at our peril,

because it is the very basis of our lives.

The second characteristic is that of tolerance.

Indian society today is possible only because of it.

In its political and social expression it takes the

form of secularism. But the secularism of India is

rooted not in modern Western concepts of materialism

or atheism, but in the immemorial concept that the

next man has as much right to his inner experiences

as I. We should never mistake this important source

of tolerance, however much it may superficially

resemble any other form of tolerance.

The man who wishes to enter the path of self-realisation

must practise these virtues in himself

first, before he can accept them from others as his

right. Hence the methodology of the Sufi and Indian

schools insists, each perhaps in its own way, upon

tolerance of others and also upon individual composure

of mind. How is composure attained?

Composure is necessary because the unregenerate

mind is, in fact, not one mind, or 'self. It is

composed of a number of confused, often conflicting

'selves'. These must first be focussed, integrated,

centralised, stabilised. Only when this is done can

the mind work as one entity, capable

of tackling the

larger job of producing the Ideal Man: the man who

lies hidden or rather incipient within us all. This

is where the teacher comes into the picture. He

is the guide who will enable the Seeker to find his

way in life. There are false teachers, just as there

are bad goldsmiths. But inner cognition plus careful

observation tells all but the foolish which is the

master for him.

Far from being old-fashioned, anachronistic,

mumbo-jumbo, the discoveries of the ancient schools

which are represented in the work of the Sufis today,

are the result of enlightened, progressive investigation

into the human mind. Metaphysical elaborations,

meaningless accretions, have surrounded a great deal

of Sufi preaching, and confused, misrepresented even,

the truths of these inner schools. But nothing can

destroy their essential validity.


Originally published in Indo-Asian Culture, 10 (1962) 419-425; revised version published in Sufi Thought and Action, assembled by Idries Shah, 1990.