Historical Consciousness

[Anonymous]

Sometimes learning about church history reveals difficult things for us to understand and make sense of, especially when scriptures are taken literally.

This is not unique to Mormonism, or Christianity, and in fact studying different religions can be a good way to understand your own religious teachings.

As the saying goes: “To know one religion is to know none.” I believe there is wisdom in that statement.

While listening to a Buddhist Podcast the other morning, I came across some interesting comments by Rita Gross, a comparative religion scholar and buddhist teacher.

She talks about Historical Consciousness which she tried to promote with her work with tibetan students.

Quote:

Historical Consciousness

“Historical Consciousness” values rationality, the comparative perspective, and doesn’t abide by the dictates of religious traditional authorities. Anything that a traditional authority says might be good thinking, but it also might not be good thinking. So you have to check it out.

… I was pretty shocked that most Tibetans for instance do think that the historical Buddha gave the Heart Sutra … to whomever was there , you know, I’ve known that forever that that isn’t an historical narrative and it has never effected my willingness to study the Heart Sutra and to take it very seriously as a foundational religious text. In other words, to be a foundational religious text, it doesn’t matter whether or not those events happened literally at X time in history. So that’s bringing the historical consciousness in to say there is just no way as an event that a camcorder could have recorded it this way, it just didn’t happen that way. And that absolutely does not affect the relevance of the teachings contained in that text for a religious practitioner. And in fact, you would be a much weaker practitioner if you have to be a fundamentalist because that’s a very brittle kind of point of view that gets defensive very easily and fractures very easily in the line of any kind of serious study or questioning. That’s when people start to lose their confidence in religious traditions, is when they start to see that “No this couldn’t have been something the camcorder recorded.” But what the camcorder would have recorded isn’t as important as the meanings encoded in this text, that’s what counts.

…I held them for a whole year just studying polytexts and things the Buddha said as far as we can tell (because you know, it always outs some questions, it’s somewhat up for grabs, did the Buddha say this or is this something someone else put in his mouth later on). The example that I used was the liturgy of Mandala Offering which we do just about every day as a liturgy, as a short ritual. It depends on the traditional pre-modern cosmology of the flat earth, Mt. Meru as the center of the earth, 4 continents stretching out from Mt. Meru and 4 islands in the middle, 4 islands in the quadrants of each of the oceans. Well, modern geography has proved that Mt Meru doesn’t exist in the way that the traditional cosmologies talk about it. That was used in the 19th century by Christians to try to convince Buddhists that their religion wasn’t true. “See, there isn’t even a Mt. Meru.” And if people don’t understand the difference between imagery and empirical language, you can lose your confidence in traditions very easily at that point. So I think it’s very important to be full up honest about what history shows us, and then to say, “And so what difference does that make to our religious practice?” I think it only strengthens a deep practice.

So I told these people, look, you do this liturgy every morning, but not a one of you literally believes in the cosmology that this liturgy is based on. You know it’s symbolic. You know that it doesn’t have to be empirically true to be meaningful. So why are you so hung up on the Heart Suttra and the historical Buddha actually teaching that sutra during his lifetime, why can’t you see there are parallel situations? And I saw lights start to go on in people’s eyes at that point. And I used the example that ordinary language, every day we say that the sun rises, we know that its not the sun rising. We know it’s the earth turning. We know in so many ways how to negotiate in this post-European Enlightenment and how the traditions worked.

Source: Interview on Buddhist Geeks Ep 227, with Rita Gross.

Perhaps if more people begin to understand this in Mormonism, there might come a day when there is more historical consciousness and “full up honesty” about what history shows us so we can focus on the meanings behind the scriptural stories.

[Anonymous]

Quote:

If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report, or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.

That is one of my favorite aspects of “pure Mormonism” – and I wish we collectively accepted and lived it better.

Thanks for sharing something that is praiseworthy, Heber.

[Author]

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