The Cost of Religious Metaphor

The Seventh Century Buddhist Sikshasamuccaya said, “Thought does not arise without an object. Can thought look at thought? No. Just as the blade of a sword cannot cut itself, or a fingertip touch itself, so thought cannot see thought.”


The flat earth, the pancake world, can be experienced: the gods are up there; the dead are down there; and our existence depends upon balancing cosmic forces here on the pancake. But the expanding universe? Well, in the expanding universe, the galaxies are like raisins in raisin bread as it bakes. . .

That metaphor is not nearly as compelling as one in which the wraiths of the dead rise like black smoke from the earth at midnight!

Infinity? I know that mathematicians look to set theory. But I am not included in the set "understands sets." For me, the “Net of Indira” makes much more sense:

Once the great god Indra, as gods will, wished to possess the most beautiful of all things. And so she ordered Vishwakarma, the cunning artificer of the gods, to make her a marvelous net. And just as Vishwakarma had built all the worlds that are, he built a net that stretched, in all directions, to infinity. And at each juncture in the net Vishwakarma set a precious stone, so that, just as the net was infinity, so was the number of precious stones. And so it was that each stone reflected every other stone, an endless reflection of stones, each reflecting each and all, an infinite regress in reflection. And the net of Indra was so fine that a touch to any part sent the whole shivering.

Perhaps this story does not help me see what infinity “really” is, but by thinking about it, I EXPERIENCE infinity. (At least in my own small way.)

Ten dimensions? Falling into Black Holes?

Humanity has been through a lot of cosmologies. What the successful ones have in common is their compelling connection to the human scale, to things we can understand.

We can understand a woman and a man in a garden. It feels good to have a god that creates us in his image.

We know more about the universe now, yet we do not have to live in a universe of “unyielding despair.” We can live in a universe in which we know that our metaphors are metaphors, but that they are keys to ultimate reality.

The universe is not a snake swallowing its tail. But perhaps it helps to imagine it that way. The arc that bends toward justice may or may not be bent by the “hand of God.” But perhaps it helps to imagine it that way.

As long as we control our metaphors; as long as we do not bow down to our metaphors, making them our idols, the metaphors themselves keep us warm in a universe that fits to a human scale.

And we—as we must—find our way to live in the cosmos.