West Meets East 2

As we walked out of the Nanputuo Temple, with the green rocky hills of Xiamen rising behind us, I said to Huang Renda that the same spiritual life is described everywhere, in all cultures, but in different ways. Sometimes the descriptions appear so different on the surface that they seem totally unrelated to each other. Some Western scholars argue that Buddhist mysticism has no similarity to Christian mysticism, for example, that they are different products of different cultures. But as far as I can tell, I said, they are virtually identical. They approach the same experience from different angles. How is the Avici hell any different from the hell depicted in Dante's Inferno? "Abandon all hope you who enter here," it says over the entrance to Dante's hell.
Huang Renda, a student of religion, mysticism, poetry and martial arts, agreed with me. "The same voice is listening to us all," he said.
"The problem for us is to notice the fundamental patterns, that are the same in Plato, Lao-tse, Buddha, St. Paul, Plotinus, Hui Neng, Rumi and Dante," I said. "The trouble is, the actual patterns are almost impossible to talk about. You don't notice them by rational analysis, and that's why the scholars go wrong when they say Buddhist and Christian mystics are saying different things. You notice them by other means."
We walked past the city buses, the dark-skinned Chinese women hawking incense in front of the temple, and the big pool where the brown remains of lotus plants littered the water. In a few days I would leave mild Xiamen and return home to Maine's spruces, rough in the distant, icy glitter of the January sun.
"When Dante had journeyed almost to the top of Mount Purgatory," I said, "he turned to say something to Virgil, who had guided him through the pits of Hell and up the slope toward Eden. But before he could speak, he saw that Virgil had vanished."
"Who is Virgil?"
"Virgil was the great Roman poet. In Dante he represents the rational intellect. Dante needed him as a guide through Hell and Purgatory. But when Dante reached a certain point in his journey, a level of the growth of his awareness, his rational intellect became impractical and no longer useful. He was ready to navigate by intuition and moral sensibility. When that happened, Virgil disappeared and Dante continued into heaven under the guidance of Beatrice, who is a figure of, among other things, love."
"I didn't know that," Huang Renda said, "but it accords exactly with my understanding."
"That's what I mean," I said. "I wish I could speak Chinese."
"We are all translators," Huang Renda said.