Letter from Frithjof Schuon to Julius Evola

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  • timotheus.lutz
    Described only as an ‘extract from a letter from Frithjof Schuon of February 1971’, judging by the context the following is obviously a response to J.
    Message 1 of 1 , Aug 29, 2016

      Described only as an ‘extract from a letter from Frithjof Schuon of February 1971’, judging by the context the following is obviously a response to J. Evola regarding his book The Doctrine of Awakening, and the first we have heard of any correspondence between them. These objections and the relevant passages from Evola’s book exemplify two vastly different spiritual outlooks, although the two authors have been categorized as belonging to the same ‘school’ by some superficial researchers.

       

      ‘The “doctrine of Awakening” presented briefly at the beginning of your book is correct in principle; this is obvious. But it becomes totally false and therefore spiritually inoperative—to say the least— once it becomes “agnostic”, “iconoclastic”, and “anti-religious” [1], for in this case any religious dogmatism is more real or less false than it. It is the religions that provide an adequate basis for the “doctrine of Awakening”, and they do this in their esoterisms. As messages of salvation, they are of course situated within the dream world, but this does not mean that they are just anything, for distinctions must be made even here: within the dream these messages realize in a symbolical and horizontal way what ‘Awakening’ is totally and vertically, and thus they represent an indispensable point of departure for ‘Awakening’. It is impossible to escape the dream without the Will of Him who dreams—Brahma saguna—and without the Grace of Him who, within the dream, reflects Him who dreams [2]. This reflection is the Avatāra, and it is only through the Avatāra—and therefore through God—that we can escape the dream; otherwise our “doctrine of Awakening” is nothing more than inoperative philosophy and spiritual suicide. “Without me ye can do nothing”, and also “He that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad”. The Avatāra—whether Christ or Muhammad or the Buddha—is Shūnyamūrti, “Manifestation of the Void”, hence of “Awakening”; following the Buddha, for example, does not mean imitating some model as it appears in books; it means entering the Buddhist Sangha in one of its traditional forms—hence the “Triple Refuge”—and integration into the Theravāda or, on the Mahayanic side, into Jōdo-Shinshū or Zen, with all the liturgical consequences this implies. An “Awakening” without the Avatāra, hence without religion, will turn into Satanism [3]; the dream itself will play the “Awakening”, and this leads nowhere. Furthermore, I absolutely do not see what harm there could be in salvation simply because it is still part of the dream—but it is the summit of the dream!—for this dream, all things considered, is not an unintelligible chaos; if it were, there would be no qualitative differentiations, and the notion of “Awakening” itself would not exist. Before one can leave the dream, one must prostrate oneself before the Lord of the dream, who is God, and before His central reflection and spokesman in the dream: the Revealer, the Avatāra [4].’ (Reprinted in Frithjof Schuon, Logic and Transcendence: A New Translation with Selected Letters, pp. 242-243)

       

      1. He is probably referring to the following: ‘Zen appears to have represented as strong a reaction against all this as, in its own time, original Buddhism did against its own background of circumstances. Zen will have nothing to do with speculations, canonical writings, rites, or religious aber­rations. It is even positively iconoclastic. It does not, like Nāgārjuna, discuss tran­scendental truth, but desires to create, through a direct action of the mind on the mind, the conditions for its actual realization . . . “The Scriptures are nothing more than useless paper”, says Rin-zai, a Zen mas­ter . . . Texts, dogmas, precepts are so many bonds or so many crutches, to he put aside that one may advance on one's own.’ (The Doctrine of Awakening: A Study on the Buddhist Ascesis, trans. H.E. Musson, London: Luzac & Co. 1951, p. 280)

       

      2. One would expect a metaphysician of Schuon’s level to use more precise language in objecting to Evola’s view of Buddhism as precise, conscious, and not determined by religious suggestions, instead of merely referring to the ‘Grace’ and ‘Will’ of the anthropomorphic Judeo-Christian God – concepts that have no meaning to the Buddhism Evola is referring to. ‘The Buddhist ascesis is conscious, in the sense that in many forms of asceti­cism – and in the case of Christian asceticism almost without exception – the acces­sory is inextricably tied tip with the essential, and ascetic realizations are, one might say, indirect because they result from impulses and workings of the mind determined by religious suggestions or raptures; while in Buddhism there is direct action, based on knowledge, conscious of its aim and developing throughout in controlled stages. [. . .] We can fairly claim that in Buddhism – as also in yoga – asceticism is raised to the dignity and impersonality of a science: what is elsewhere fragmentary here becomes systematic; what is instinct becomes conscious technique; the spiritual laby­rinth of those minds that achieve a real elevation through the workings of some “grace” (since it is only accidentally and by means of suggestions, fears, hopes, and raptures that they discover the right way) is replaced by a calm and uniform light, present even in abysmal depths, and by a method that has no need of external means.’ (Ibid. p. 8) ‘The fact is that Buddhism in its original form carefully avoids anything that savors of simple "reli­gion." of mysticism in its most generally accepted sense, of systems of "faith" or devotion, or of dogmatic rigidity . . . It has been claimed that Buddhism, in its essentials, and leaving out of account its later popular forms, entirely centered as they were on a deified concept of its founder, is not a religion. This is true. We must, however, be quite clear as to what we mean when we say this. The peoples of the West are so inured to the religion that has come to predominate in their countries that they consider it as a kind of unit of measure and as a model for every other religion: they are near denying the dignity of true religion to any concept of the supersensory and to man's relationship to it, when the concept in any way differs from the Judeo-Christian type. The result of this has been that the most ancient traditions of the West itself-beginning with the Aryo-Hellenic and the Aryo-Roman-are no longer understood in their real significance or effective value; so it is easy to imagine what happened to older and often more remote traditions, particularly to those created by the Aryan races in Asia.’ (Ibid. pp. 9-10)


      3. It looks like the Swiss essayist did not read the entire book. If he had, he would have seen that Evola, far from advocating ‘imitating some model as it appears in books’, was actually providing his analysis ‘as a contribution to the understanding of premodern spirituality’, albeit one that could ‘serve . . . as something more than a simple read­ing.’ (Ibid. p. 300). It is clear that Evola simply intended to set early Buddhism into relief with other forms of spirituality as a prime example of a ‘clear and undiluted’ system of ascesis. Earlier, he writes: ‘As we wished to discuss asceticism in this sense, we asked ourselves: what example can history furnish as the best suited for examination as a comprehensive and universal ascetic system that is clear and undiluted, well tried and well set out, in tune with the spirit of Aryan man and yet prevailing in the modern age? We eventually decided that the answer to our question could only be found in the ‘Doctrine of Awakening’, which, in its original form, satisfies all these conditions.’ (Ibid. p. 5). We feel confident in saying that, although the following qualifications are from the Italian author’s study on Tantrism, they apply equally to all of his esoteric studies: ‘I am not even dreaming of proposing Tantrism to the Western world, or of importing it here in the West, so that people may practice it in its original aspects. These aspects, as we have seen, are strictly and inseparably interwoven with local Hindu and Tibetan traditions and with the corresponding spiritual climate. Nonetheless, some of Tantrism's fundamental ideas may be considered by those who wish to deal with the problems encountered in our day and age . . . Having described one of the most interesting forms of yoga, namely, kundalini yoga, in its original form, without attempting to adapt it or to popularize it, I sincerely hope that this present exposition will offer to some readers a few elements for meditation, outside the context of specialized Oriental studies and in the context of their personal problems. (The Yoga of Power, trans. Guido Stucco, pp. 189-190)

       

      4. Speaking of tying up the accessory with the essential, Schuon has managed here to tie up the accessory particular to one spiritual form with the essential of a completely different one.

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