Religion is

human beings' relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual, or divine. Religion is commonly regarded as consisting of a person's relation to God or to gods or spirits. Worship is probably the most basic element of religion, but moral conduct, right belief, and participation in religious institutions are generally also constituent elements of the religious life as practiced by believers and worshipers and as commanded by religious sages and scriptures.

Phenomenology of religion

The material with which phenomenology is concerned is all the different types of religious thinking and action, ideas about divinity, and cultic acts. Kristensen's systematic organization of religious phenomena may be seen in the table of contents of his Meaning of Religion in which he divides his presentation of material into discussions of (1) cosmology, which includes worship of nature in the form of sky and earth deities, animal worship, totemism, and animism, (2) anthropology, made up of a variety of considerations on the nature of man, his life, and his associations in society, (3) cultus, which involves consideration of sacred places, sacred times, and sacred images, and (4) cultic acts, such as prayer, oaths and curses, and ordeals. Kristensen was not concerned with the historical development or the description of a particular religion or even a series of religions but rather with grouping the typical elements of the entire religious life, irrespective of the community in which they might occur.

Probably the best known phenomenologist is G. van der Leeuw, another Dutch scholar. In his Religion in Essence and Manifestation, van der Leeuw categorized the material of religious life under the following headings: (1) the object of religion, or that which evokes the religious response, (2) the subject of religion, in which there are three divisions: the sacred man, the sacred community, and the sacred within man, or the soul, (3) object and subject in their reciprocal operation as outward reaction and inward action, (4) the world, ways to the world, and the goals of the world, and (5) forms, which must take into account religions and the founders of religions. Van der Leeuw was not interested in grouping religious communities as such but rather in laying out the types of religious expression. He discussed distinct religions only because religion in the abstract has no existence. He classified religions according to 12 forms: (1) religion of remoteness and flight (ancient China and 18th-century deism), (2) religion of struggle (Zoroastrianism), (3) religion of repose, which has no specific historical form but is found in every religion in the form of mysticism, (4) religion of unrest or theism, which again has no specific form but is found in many religions, (5) dynamic of religions in relation to other religions (syncretism and missions), (6) dynamic of religions in terms of internal developments (revivals and reformations), (7) religion of strain and form, the first that van der Leeuw characterizes as one of the "great" forms of religion (Greece), (8) religion of infinity and of asceticism (Indian religions but excluding Buddhism), (9) religion of nothingness and compassion (Buddhism), (10) religion of will and of obedience (Israel), (11) the religion of majesty and humility (Islam), and (12) the religion of love (Christianity). The above is not a classification of religions as organized systems. Categories 3, 4, 5, and 6 relate to elements found in many if not all historical religious communities, and the categories from 7 onward are not classifications but attempts to characterize particular communities by short phrases that express what van der Leeuw considered to be their essential spirit. The "primitive" religions of less-developed peoples are not classified.

Hegel classified religions according to the role that they have played in the self-realization of Spirit. The historical religions fall into three great divisions, corresponding with the stages of the dialectical progression. At the lowest level of development, according to Hegel, are the religions of nature, or religions based principally upon the immediate consciousness deriving from sense experience. They include: immediate religion or magic at the lowest level; religions, such as those of China and India plus Buddhism, that represent a division of consciousness within itself; and others, such as the religions of ancient Persia, Syria, and Egypt, that form a transition to the next type. At an intermediate level are the religions of spiritual individuality, among which Hegel placed Judaism (the religion of sublimity), ancient Greek religion (the religion of beauty), and ancient Roman religion (the religion of utility). At the highest level is absolute religion, or the religion of complete spirituality, which Hegel identified with Christianity. The progression thus proceeds from man immersed in nature and functioning only at the level of sensual consciousness, to man becoming conscious of himself in his individuality as distinct from nature, and beyond that to a grand awareness in which the opposition of individuality and nature is overcome in the realization of Absolute Spirit.

Many criticisms have been offered of Hegel's classification. An immediately noticeable shortcoming is the failure to make a place for Islam, one of the major historical religious communities. The classification is also questionable for its assumption of continuous development in history. The notion of perpetual progress is not only doubtful in itself but is also compromised as a principle of classification because of its value implications.

Nevertheless, Hegel's scheme was influential and was adapted and modified by a generation of philosophers of religion in the Idealist tradition. Departure from Hegel's scheme, however, may be seen in the works of Otto Pfleiderer, a German theologian of the 19th century. Pfleiderer believed it impossible to achieve a significant grouping of religions unless, as a necessary preliminary condition, the essence of religion were first isolated and clearly understood. Essence is a philosophical concept, however, not a historical one. Pfleiderer considered it indispensable to have conceptual clarity about the underlying and underived basis of religion from which all else in religious life follows. In Die Religion, ihr Wesen und ihre Geschichte ("Religion, Its Essence and History"), Pfleiderer held that the essence of religious consciousness exhibits two elements, or moments, perpetually in tension with one another: one of freedom and one of dependence, with a number of different kinds of relationships between these two. One or the other may predominate, or they may be mixed in varying degrees.

Pfleiderer derived his classification of religions from the relationships between these basic elements. He distinguished one great group of religions that exhibits extreme partiality for one over against the other. The religions in which the sense of dependence is virtually exclusive are those of the ancient Semites, the Egyptians, and the Chinese. Opposite these are the early Indian, Germanic, and Greek and Roman religions, in which the sense of freedom prevails. The religion of this group may also be seen in a different way, as nature religions in the less-developed cultures or as culture or humanitarian religions in the more advanced. A second group of religions exhibits a recognition of both elements of religion, but gives them unequal value. These religions are called supernatural religions. Among them Zoroastrianism gives more weight to freedom as a factor in its piety, and Brahmanism and Buddhism are judged to have a stronger sense of dependence. The last group of religions is the monotheistic religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, which are divided again into two sub-groups, i.e., those that achieve an exact balance of the elements of religion and those that achieve a blending and merging of the elements. Both Judaism and Islam grant the importance of the two poles of piety, though there is a slight tendency in Islam toward the element of dependence and in Judaism toward freedom. It is Christianity alone, he claimed, that accomplishes the blending of the two, realizing both together in their fullness, the one through the other.

The intellectual heritage that lies behind this classification will be immediately apparent. The classification reflects its time (19th century) and place (western Europe) of conception in the sense that the study of religion was not yet liberated from its ties to the philosophy of religion and theology.

The essence of religion and the context of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions

An acceptable definition of religion itself is difficult to attain. Attempts have been made to find an essential ingredient in all religions (e.g., the numinous, or spiritual, experience; the contrast between the sacred and the profane; belief in gods or in God), so that an "essence" of religion can be described. But objections have been brought against such attempts, either because the rich variety of men's religions makes it possible to find counterexamples or because the element cited as essential is in some religions peripheral. The gods play a very subsidiary role, for example, in most phases of Theravada ("Way of the Elders") Buddhism. A more promising method would seem to be that of exhibiting aspects of religion that are typical of religions, though they may not by universal. The occurrence of the rituals of worship is typical, but there are cases, however, in which such rituals are not central. Thus, one of the tasks of a student of religion is to gather together an inventory of types of religious phenomena.

The fact that there is dispute over the possibility of finding an essence of religion means that there is likewise a problem about speaking of the study of religion or of religions, for it is misleading to think of religion as something that "runs through" religions. This brings to light one of the major questions of method in the study of the subject. In practice, a religion is a particular system, or a set of systems, in which doctrines, myths, rituals, sentiments, institutions, and other similar elements are interconnected. Thus, in order to understand a given belief that occurs in such a system, it is necessary to look at its particular context--that is, other beliefs held in the system, rituals, and other aspects. Belief in the lordship of Christ in the early Christian Church, for example, has to be seen in the context of a belief in the Creator and of the sacramental life of the community. This systematic character of a religion has been referred to by the 20th-century Dutch theologian Hendrik Kraemer as "totalitarian"; but a better term would be "organic." Thus, there arises the problem of whether or not one belief or practice embedded in an organic system can properly be compared to a similar item in another organic system. To put the matter in another way, every religion has its unique properties, and attempts to make interreligious comparisons may hide these unique aspects. Most students of religion agree, however, that valid comparisons are possible, though they are difficult to make. Indeed, one can see the very uniqueness of a religion through comparison, which includes a contrast. The importance of setting religions side by side is why the study of religions is sometimes referred to as the "comparative study of religion"--though a number of scholars prefer not to use this phrase, partly because some comparative work in the past has incorporated value judgments about other religions.

But even if an inventory of types of belief and practices can be gathered--so as to provide a typical profile of what counts as religion--the absence of a tight definition means that there will always be a number of cases about which it is difficult to decide. Thus, some ideologies, such as Soviet Marxism, Maoism, and Fascism, may have analogies to religion. Certain attempts at an essentialist definition of religion, such as that of the German-American theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965), who defined religion in terms of man's ultimate concern, would leave the way open to count these ideologies as proper objects of the study of religion. Tillich, incidentally, calls them "quasi-religions." Though there is no consensus on this point among scholars, it is not unreasonable to hold that the frontier between traditional religions and modern ideologies represents one part of the field to be studied.

 

The phenomenologist of religion who probably has had the greatest influence after Otto, partly because he is fairly explicit about method, is Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890-1950), who was somewhat influenced by the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) and his notion of prelogical mentality, which he applied to primitive cultures to distinguish them from civilized cultures. Van der Leeuw emphasized power as being the basic religious conception. His major work, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, is an ambitious and wide-ranging typology of religious phenomena, including the kinds of sacrifice, types of holy men, categories of religious experience, and other types of religious phenomena. The work has been criticized, however, as being unhistorical. Partly because of his philosophical presuppositions, borrowed chiefly from Husserl, van der Leeuw held the disputable doctrine that Phenomenology knows nothing of the historical development of religion: it picks out timeless essences of religious phenomena. Apparently it is not necessary, however, to hold this doctrine, since one could as well classify types of religious change (i.e., temporal sequences), as indeed Max Weber attempted to do. Classificatory and historical techniques and conclusions are not incompatible, however. Thus, the work of Nathan Söderblom, who, as well as being a historian of religions, was prominent in the ecumenical movement, combined the two aspects in his Living God.

Relationship of theology to the history of religions and philosophy

Relationship to the history of religions

If theology explicates the way in which the believer understands his faith--or, if faith is not a dominating quality, the way in which a religion's practitioners understand their religion--this implies that it claims to be normative, even if the claim does not, as in Hinduism and Buddhism, culminate in the pretention to be absolutely authoritative. The normative element in these religions arises simply out of the authority of a divine teacher, or a revelation (e.g., a vision or auditory revelation), or of any other kind of spiritual encounter over against which one feels committed. The newly evolving discipline of the history of religions, which encompasses also religious psychology, religious sociology, and religious phenomenology as well as philosophy of religion, has emancipated itself from the normative aspect in favour of a purely empirical analysis. This empirical aspect, which corresponds to the modern conception of science, can be applied only if it functions on the basis of objectifiable (empirically verifiable) entities. Revelation of the kind of event that would have to be characterized as transcendent, however, can never be understood as such an objectifiable entity. Only those forms of religious life that are positive and arise out of experience can be objectified. Wherever such forms are given, the religious man is taken as the source of the religious phenomena that are to be interpreted. Understood in this manner, the history of religions represents a necessary step in the process of secularization. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that theology and the history of religions only contradict one another. The "theologies"--for want of a better term--of the various religions are concerned with religious phenomena, and the adherents of the religions of the more advanced cultures are themselves constrained--especially at a time of increasing cultural interdependency--to take cognizance of and to interpret theologically the fact that besides their own religion there are many others. In this regard, then, there are not only analytical but also theological statements concerning religious phenomena, particularly in regard to the manner in which such statements are encountered in specific primitive or high religions. Thus, the objects of the history of religions and those of theology cannot be clearly separated. They are merely approached with different categories and criteria. If the history of religions does not surrender its neutrality, since such a surrender would thereby reduce the discipline to anthropology in an ideological sense (e.g., religion understood as mere projection of the psyche or of societal conditions), theology will recognize the history of religions as a science providing valuable material and as one of the sciences in the universe of sciences.

 

Yoga

Sanskrit: "Yoking," or "Union"), one of the six orthodox systems (darshans) of Indian philosophy. Its influence has been widespread among many other schools of Indian thought. Its basic text is the Yoga-sutras by Patañjali (c. 2nd century BC?).

The practical aspects of Yoga play a more important part than does its intellectual content, which is largely based on the philosophy of Samkhya , with the exception that Yoga assumes the existence of God, who is the model for the aspirant to spiritual release. Yoga holds with Samkhya that the achievement of spiritual liberation occurs when the self (purusha) is freed from the bondages of matter (prakriti) that have resulted because of ignorance and illusion. The Samkhya view of the evolution of the world through identifiable stages leads Yoga to an attempt to reverse this order, as it were, so that a person can increasingly dephenomenalize himself until the self reenters its original state of purity and consciousness. Once the aspirant has learned to control and suppress the obscuring mental activities of his mind and has succeeded in ending his attachment to material objects, he will be able to enter samadhi--i.e., a state of deep concentration that results in a blissful, ecstatic union with the ultimate reality.

Generally the Yoga process is described in eight stages (astanga-yoga, "eight-membered Yoga"). The first two stages are ethical preparations. They are yama ("restraint"), which denotes abstinence from injury (ahimsa), falsehood, stealing, lust, and avarice; and niyama ("observance"), which denotes cleanliness of body, contentment, austerity, study, and devotion to God.

The next two stages are physical preparations. Asana ("seat"), a series of exercises in physical posture, is intended to condition the aspirant's body and make it supple, flexible, and healthy. Mastery of the asanas is reckoned by one's ability to hold one of the prescribed postures for an extended period of time without involuntary movement or physical distractions. Pranayama ("breath control") is a series of exercises intended to stabilize the rhythm of breathing in order to encourage complete respiratory relaxation.

The fifth stage, pratyahara ("withdrawal"), involves control of the senses, or the ability to withdraw the attention of the senses from outward objects to the mind.

The first five stages are called external aids to Yoga; the remaining three are purely mental or internal aids. Dharana ("holding on") is the ability to hold and confine awareness of externals to one object for a long period of time (a common exercise is fixing the mind on an object of meditation, such as the tip of the nose or an image of the deity). Dhyana ("concentrated meditation") is the uninterrupted contemplation of the object of meditation, beyond any memory of ego. Samadhi ("self-collectedness") is the final stage and is a precondition of attaining release from the cycle of rebirth. In this stage the meditator perceives or experiences the object of his meditation and himself as one.

The prehistory of Yoga is not clear. The early Vedic texts speak of ecstatics, who may well have been predecessors of the later yogis (followers of Yoga). Although Yoga has been made into a separate school (darshana), its influence and many of its practices have been felt in other schools.

In the course of time, certain stages of Yoga became ends in themselves, notably, the breathing exercises and sitting postures, as in the Yoga school of Hatha Yoga. Patañjali's Yoga is sometimes known as Raja ("Royal") Yoga, to distinguish it from the other schools.

Yoga, in a less technical sense of achieving union with God, is also used, as in the epic poem the Bhagavadgita, to distinguish the alternate paths (margas) to such a union.

In the 20th century, the philosophy and practice of Yoga became increasingly popular in the West. The first important organization for practitioners in the United States was the Self-Realization Fellowship, founded by Paramahansa Yogananda in 1920. Some 50 years later, instruction emphasizing both the physical and spiritual benefits of Yogic techniques was available through a wide variety of sectarian Yoga organizations, nonsectarian classes, and television programs in the United States and Europe.

 

Hatha yoga

(Sanskrit: "Union of Force"), a school of Indian philosophy that stresses mastery of the body as a way of attaining spiritual perfection. It is an outgrowth of the Yoga school of Indian philosophy. Hatha Yoga traces its origins to Gorakhnath, the legendary 12th-century founder of the Kanphata Yogis.

Hatha Yoga places great importance on purificatory processes, regulation of breathing (pranayama), and the adoption of bodily postures called asanas. A common asana is the padmasana ("lotus posture"), in which the crossed feet rest on the opposite thighs. This is the position in which many Hindu and Buddhist gods are often depicted.

Hatha Yoga has grown in popularity in the West as a form of exercise and relaxation. Western physiologists and psychologists have also become interested in it and in related forms of Yoga that focus on the control of bodily processes. Adept Yoga practitioners have shown remarkable abilities to lower their own blood pressure and to regulate body temperature and respiration rate.

Religious consequences of yoga

The one religious consequence of the Samkhya-Yoga is an emphasis on austere asceticism and a turning away from the ritualistic elements of Hinduism deriving from the Brahmanical sources. Though they continue to remain as an integral part of the Hindu faith, no major religious order thrived on the basis of these philosophies.

 

from Indian philosophy

God, self, and body

In the Yoga-sutras, God is defined as a distinct self (purusa), untouched by sufferings, actions, and their effects; his existence is proved on the ground that the degrees of knowledge found in finite beings, in an ascending order, has an upper limit--i.e., omniscience, which is what characterizes God. He is said to be the source of all secular and scriptural traditions; he both revealed the Vedas and taught the first fathers of mankind. Surrender of the effects of action to God is regarded as a recommended observance.

As in Samkhya, the self is distinguished from the mind (citta): the mind is viewed as an object, an aggregate. This argument is used to prove the existence of a self other than the mind. The mental state is not self-intimating; it is known in introspection. It cannot know both itself and its object. It rather is known by the self, whose essence is pure, undefiled consciousness. That the self is not changeable is proved by the fact that were it changeable the mental states would be sometimes known and sometimes unknown--which, however, is not the case, because a mental state is always known. To say that the self knows means that the self is reflected in the mental state and makes the latter manifested. The aim of Yoga is to arrest mental modifications (citta-vrtti) so that the self remains in its true, undefiled essence and is, thus, not subject to suffering.

The attitude of the Yoga-sutras to the human body is ambivalent. The body is said to be filthy and unclean. Thus, the ascetic cultivates a disgust for it. Yet, much of the discipline laid down in the Yoga-sutras concerns perfection of the body, with the intent to make it a fit instrument for spiritual perfection. Steadiness in bodily posture and control of the breathing process are accorded a high place. The perfection of body is said to consist in "beauty, grace, strength and adamantine hardness."

 

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