Mr Socrates, meet Mr Buddha and Mr Fox

In the mid-1980s I was working as a research assistant for a pair of authors who were writing a textbook on world religions. One of the tasks they assigned to me was to read Max Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to see how well his analysis applied to Eastern religions. On a personal level, Weber's book had quite an impact on me in that it made me aware of my own Protestant roots and on how various Protestant doctrines had influenced my heart and mind. I read some of Weber's other materials as well and found myself intrigued by his discussion of prophetic traditions. If memory serves me well, Weber distinguished between prophets who spoke for God (as in the Abrahamic religions) from prophets who spoke for a more impersonal wisdom (as in Buddhism and Confucianism).

As it happened, at the same time I was reading Weber, I was also reading the dialogues of Plato that deal with the trial and death of Socrates. Struck by Socrates's frequent references to his daimon, a kind of inner voice that helped him distinguish right from wrong and was very much at the heart of his notion of the “examined life” that he famously believed was uniquely worth living, I could not help wondering whether he, too, might not be considered a kind of prophet. Most of my friends who were philosophers were not particularly receptive to the idea of Socrates as a wisdom-prophet along the lines of the Buddha or Confucius or Laozi, nor were most of my friends in religious studies. It occurred to me that I was living in an academic culture in which religion is seen as one thing and philosophy is seen as another, that talking of Socrates as a kind of prophet (or the Buddha as a philosopher) was to invite accusations of being terribly confused.

My experience with Quakers also became part of all this thinking about Weber and Socrates. George Fox, who founded the movement of religious seekers who were eventually called Quakers, often spoke of the inward light. Influenced by his reading of the Gospel of John, Fox was convinced that all human beings are capable of being guided directly by the logos—the Word that was with God in the beginning and that was identified with the Christ that existed even before creation. Fox was convinced that there is “that of God” in everyone. Moreover, he was convinced that this bit of God that dwells in all human beings, which he variously called the Inward Light or the Seed, would guide everyone who learned to still the mind, reduce the influence of what we nowadays call the ego, and wait patiently with an open mind and a heart filled with love. Fox's conviction that no one could possibly understand the scriptures without being in touch with the Inward Light that was itself the source of all scriptures, and that one who had access to the Inward Light did not really require the guidance of either scriptures or a professional priesthood or trained theologians, led to numerous confrontations with the religious authorities of his day. He was accused of the blasphemy of thinking that he was Christ, to which he responded that a more accurate statement of his conviction is that everyone is Christ—a response that did not necessarily persuade his accusers that he was innocent of blasphemy.

George Fox said of the Inward Light that it reveals to everyone his or her sinfulness, but that the very Light that shows us our sin is also the Light that shows us the way out of sin. The very awareness that shows us our failures also shows us how to succeed. By following the guidance out of sin or failure, said Fox, anyone can participate in “a certain kind of perfection.” In other words, the Inward Light has the capacity to free all human beings from original sin. Christ can be said to be the savior and redeemer of all human beings in the sense that Christ is but another name for this Inward Light. Salvation through Christ has nothing to do with Jesus dying on the cross as an atonement for the sins of Adam, as is taught in conventional Christianity. Rather, the death on the cross dramatically shows the death of what Paul called the flesh (which corresponds to what we now call the ego) that is necessary if one is to gain access to the healing Inward Light.

As I reflected on the writings of George Fox, I could not help being struck by how similar all his talk of the Inward Light was to Socrates's talk of his daimon. The inner guide that is within all human beings (and I would want to insist further in all sentient beings) is not exactly the same as conscience, although conscience is part of it, nor is it exactly the same as instinct, although instinct is also part of it. The Inward Light (which is also, I would contend, the daimon) guides us in all things, not just in matters of morality. The better one learns to heed this inward light, the less likely one is to fall into counter-productive and destructive patterns of behavior. The people whom we call sages, saints and prophets are those who are good at heeding their inward light most of the time.

While Fox was inclined to identify his daimon with the Word that was God and Christ, my own conditioning is not as influenced by Christian terminology as was Fox's. I am more habituated to thinking of this Inward Light as what East Asian Buddhists eventually called Buddha-nature (fó xìng). (The naughty punster in me likes to think of fóxìng as Foxing, that is, being like George Fox. But I digress.) The older and more soft-headed I become, the less important difference I can detect between the inner Buddha, the inner Christ, and the daimon. All of them, I think, are different terms for living up to our highest potentials.

It was noted above that what Saint Paul called flesh (sarx) people in our times are more inclined to call something like ego or persona. The claim was also made that our ego or persona—our sense of who we are both as individuals and as social beings—blocks the Inward Light. To the extent that I identify myself as Dayāmati Dharmacārin, Richard Hayes, American, Quaker, Buddhist, philosophy professor, male and so forth, I put up an obstacle to the best of myself that could provide valuable guidance through life. This is because one's sense of identity is constructed largely of a series of strategies (or what psychologists often call “defense mechanisms”) for dealing with pain and fear. These mechanisms are like walls. Walls keep us safe, and in so doing they block light. These walls also have the effect of making us feel that the very light they are blocking is one of the enemies against which they are offering protection. There is a sense in which that is true, for one of the things the Inward Light does is to challenge the validity of our sense of identity. This is why early Quakers often said that the Light is horrifying before it is healing. This is why many Buddhists acknowledge that it takes a lifetime to learn how to manifest one's Buddha-nature consistently. The walls of the ego seem to have a capacity to repair themselves almost as quickly as they are breached. That is why one must constantly work at breaching them.

There are numerous tools that human beings have developed for breaching the ego. One that I have come to value is called the enneagram of personality, a typology of nine basic personality types, each with two subtypes. There are many books available on the topic; the one I like best is Don Riso and Russ Hudson's The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types. Riso and Hudson speak of what they call our true self (which corresponds pretty closely to Fox's Inward Light, Socrates's daimon or Zen Buddhism's Buddha-nature), and they see the eighteen personality subtypes as what we send to a task when our true self fails to show up. The basic personality types are nine basic ways of blocking the Inward Light, nine basic ways of sinning, nine basic ways of failing to reach our highest potential—please use the language that your conditioning finds most comfortable.

This is not the place to go into any of the details of how Riso and Hudson employ the enneagram. To find that, one should go to Riso and Hudson's website. While there are those who are dismissive of the enneagram as a tool, I have found over the years that it is one of many effective tools for becoming aware of the effects of my own persona and finding my way past it from time to time. When those moments of successfully breaching the walls of the ego take place (and before those self-repairing walls are reconstructed), the prophets, the sages and the philosophers of the world make more sense. And so do birds and cockroaches and even ordinary human beings.

There is just one further point to make about Inward Light/Buddha Nature/Inner Christ/daimon and that is without gaining access to it, no kind of critical thinking is possible. Critical thinking is impeded by the reactionary force of the ego, which hastens to fortify itself against anything that is not already considered part of the self. The ego has no interest whatseover in learning anything. Even when part of one's sense of one's own identity is that one is curious and scholarly, what usually turns out to be the case is that one craves to “learn” in a slightly new form something that one already believes. This, of course, is not learning at all. The highly trained academic ego operates on the principle that if anything is important, I already know it, and if something comes along that I don't already know, then it is either wrong or trivial. (If you don't believe this, write a PhD someday and defend it in the PhD club. You'll see that most of the questions are designed either to trivialize your work or dismiss it as false. If you don't have time to write a PhD, just join an e-mail discussion group on any topic and venture to say something. Wait a few minutes. You'll be shot down in flames either for saying something stupid or stating the obvious.) In contast to all the reactionary defenses put up by the ego, critical thinking is open and dispassionately awake to whatever is of value and alert to whatever is not. In short, critical thinking is the work of the daimon when it is not being blocked by the strong-armed bodyguards who stand at the door of the ego.