While Buddhism flourished in the East, spreading as far West as modern-day Iran and East into China, the period after Socrates' death finds no great jnani religion appearing in Europe. It was with the death of another great spiritual Master, Jesus, some five hundred years after Socrates' martyrdom, that the seeds of the great religion of the West were planted. Christianity was eventually propagated in the same way as Buddhism, as the state religion for an empire, though the methods used were very different and have had a profound effect on the difference in the social expression of the two religions. As with Buddhism the empire in question had a number of minor sects to choose from to form the state religion, but before Constantine made the momentous decision about Christianity these sects flourished equally across Europe. In was in this environment that Plotinus was born, in 205, and died, in 270. He is the first of our lost buddhas of the West to leave behind a substantial corpus of writings, known as the Enneads.
The Encyclopaedia Brittanica finds a striking similarity between the Enneads and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, but it was unlikely that he Plotinus knew of them, being exposed rather to the ideas of Plato and Manichaean sects.
Most of what we know about Plotinus comes from his disciple Porphyry, who tended to concentrate on his later years, partly because Plotinus said very little about himself. Hence we are not even sure in what country he was born or anything about his early life, until he went to Alexandria at the age of twenty-eight to study philosophy. This apparently reduced him to a state of depression until he found a teacher called Ammonius Saccas. When Plotinus heard him he said, "This is the man I was looking for" and stayed with him for eleven years. All of this is related in Western tradition as being in the context of philosophy, and Plotinus as philosopher, and his Enneads as a work of philosophy. But even before examining the Enneads, we can plausibly reinterpret Plotinus's early life as the kind of spiritual search that the Buddha undertook. If Ammonius was a better philosopher than those in the Alexandrine academy, then why was he not teaching there? One explanation would be that he was a jnani Master himself (though no details of his life or teachings are known) and as such would operate outside of academia.
What then lies in Plotinus's great work, the Enneads, that suggests he was a buddha? The starting point for such an investigation lies with the concept of the One introduced by Plotinus into the stream of Greek thought at this point, a conception that lived on and had an influence in Christianity, as we shall see. But Plotinus's concept of the One is not theistic, for despite the piety and sublimity of his prose, it is not a devotional work. Neither on the other hand is it a pure jnani teaching like the Buddha's, containing as it does speculative, philosophical, cosmological and occult elements. What we find however are sections that are pure jnani, that is they describe a unitive state and a path to that state not in terms of speculation, but in the language of one who has experienced it directly. We will now look at the common ground with the Buddha, but note at the outset that the point of departure is more apparent at first glance than the commonalities, this difference to be found in the Buddha's absolute refusal to be involved in speculative thought and the construction of cosmologies.
Plotinus wrote in Greek, and, as usual, we are subject to the mindset of the translator. Because of the resonance of the concept of the "One" with the Christian God that later became the universal spiritual language of the West, there is a temptation to translate the "One" as "God" or "Father". Unless we are Greek scholars ourselves we cannot judge the relative merits of different translations, but for the purposes of demonstrating a resonance between Plotinus and the Buddha (and more generally the language of jnani) we have chosen the translation of Elmer O'Brien, which avoids the Christian terminology of "God" and "Father" to be found in the translation of Stephen Mackenna. Here is the opening section of the "Three Primal Hypostases":
How is it, then, that souls forget the divinity that begot them so that—divine by nature, divine by origin—they now know neither divinity nor self?
This evil that has befallen them has its source in self-will, in being born, in becoming different, in desiring to be independent. Once having tasted the pleasures of independence, they use their freedom to go in a direction that leads away from the origin. And when they have gone a great distance, they even forget that they came from it. Like children separated from their family since birth and educated away from home, they are ignorant now of their parentage and therefore of their identity.
Our souls know neither who nor whence they are, because they hold themselves cheap and accord their admiration and honor to everything except themselves. They bestow esteem, love, and sympathy on anything rather than on themselves. They cut themselves off, as much as may be, from the things above. They forget their worth. Ignorance of origin is caused by excessive valuation of sense objects and disdain of self, for to pursue something and hold it dear implies acknowledgement of inferiority to what is pursued. As soon as the soul thinks it is worth less than things subject to birth and death, considers itself least honorable and enduring of all, it can no longer grasp the nature and power of the divinity.
A soul in such condition can be turned about and led back to the world above and the supreme existent, the One and first, by a twofold discipline: by showing it the low value of the things its esteems at present, and by informing—reminding!—it of its nature and worth. (Enneads, V,1,1)
This beautiful passage has many resonances with Buddhist thought, for example where it points out that a preoccupation with "things subject to birth and death" leads one away from the One. In a Western context, as we have pointed out, the tendency is to assume that the "One" is the Christian God (or for that matter the Judaic or Muslim God), but in a Buddhist context there is no difficulty in reading it as "nirvana" or "buddha-nature". In fact some Buddhist traditions emphasise that all beings have "buddha-nature" and that it is not a question of a supreme attainment, but simply recognising and returning to it, as suggested in this passage. The other obvious quality of the above passage is that Plotinus has a teaching or path, equivalent to the Dhamma (Dharma) of the Buddha, and, we note, Plotinus corrects himself that the role of Master is not to inform the disciple of the nature and worth of their soul, but to remind them — echoes of Socrates.
Plotinus is quite clear that the world of things, the world of birth and death, is too highly valued, a concern that the Buddha expresses through his term "impermanence". In this sense Plotinus is following the via negativa, but not through a sense of sin or guilt as can be found in some Western traditions. He makes this point a little later in the same Ennead:
If it is soul that makes us loveable, why is it that we seek it only in others and not in ourselves? You love others because of it. Love, then, yourself. (Enneads, V,1,2)
This warmth and positive approach is typical of Plotinus and, like the Buddha, he promises Enlightenment in this lifetime, soon in fact:
So divine and precious is the Soul, be confident that, by its power, you can attain to divinity. Start your ascent. You will not need to search long. Few are the steps that separate you from your goal. Take as your guide the most divine part of the Soul, that which "borders" upon the superior realm from which it came. (Enneads, V,1,3)
What makes Plotinus's teachings closer to the Buddha's than conventional Christian teachings is the central jnani concept that transcendence is for the ordinary person, and is not reserved for divine beings. "You can attain to divinity" is the starting point for Plotinus, and his confidence in our abilities is the mark of a great Master. It is the emphasis by Plotinus on the mind as method, rather than the heart, that makes him a jnani Master. In the above passage he is introducing us to his concept of the Intelligence, the "most divine part of the Soul", a perspective that the great bhakti Masters would merely smile at.
Let us turn for a moment to Porphyry's brief account of Plotinus's life to see what there is in it that might be consistent with that of a buddha, or jnani Master. This single paragraph stands out (note that the extracts from Porphyry's Life of Plotinus are from Mackenna's translation):
Thus he was able to live at once within himself and for others; he never relaxed from his interior attention unless in sleep; and even his sleep was kept light by an abstemiousness that often prevented him taking as much as a piece of bread, and by this unbroken concentration upon his own highest nature. (Life, 8)
This is a quite beautiful characterisation of the spiritual Master: that he lived "at once within himself and for others." In the later Buddhist traditions this would be the quality of a Bhodisattva, one who lived for others, or to be more precise, one who saw the buddha-nature in others and strove continuously to help them realise it. Porphyry tells us that several men and women "of position" were so impressed with the holiness of Plotinus that they entrusted their children into his care along with all their inherited property:
He always found time for those that came to submit returns of the children's property, and he looked closely to the accuracy of the accounts: 'Until the young people take to philosophy,' he used to say, 'their fortunes and revenues must be kept intact for them.' And yet all this labour and thought over the worldly interests of so many people never interrupted, during waking hours, his intention towards the Supreme.
He was gentle, and always at the call of those having the slightest acquaintance with him. After spending twenty-six years in Rome, acting, too, as arbiter in many differences, he never made an enemy of any citizen. (Life, 9)
Plotinus held meetings with his followers, open to all-comers, that Porphyry calls "Conferences." Plotinus seems open to all questions and considerate of other views in the Conferences, though many (probably most) misunderstood him:
The fact is that these people did not understand his teaching: he was entirely free from all the inflated pomp of the professor: his lectures had the air of conversation, and he never forced upon his hearers the severely logical sub-structure of his thesis. (Life, 18)
Neither shall we explore the "severely logical substructure" of Plotinus's teachings. Instead, here is a brief glimpse into Plotinus's own experience:
It has happened often. Roused into myself from my body—outside everything and inside myself—my gaze has met a beauty wondrous and great. At such moments I have been certain that mine was the better part, mine the best of lives lived to the fullest, mine identity with the divine. Fixed there firmly, poised above everything in the intellectual that is less than the highest, utter actuality was mine.
But then there has come the descent, down from intellection to the discourse of reason. And it leaves me puzzled. Why this descent?
Indeed, why did my soul ever enter my body since even when in the body it remains what it has shown itself to be when by itself? (Enneads, IV,8,1)
This passage, apart from an insight into his interiority, raises a useful point about terminology. Plotinus calls this highest state, which we could call "nirvana" or the "non-dual state" in a Buddhist or Hindu context of transcendence, "intellection". At least this is the word that both O'Brien and Mackenna have chosen in their translations, having no recourse to Eastern vocabulary. Here is where the gulf of understanding lies between East and West, and which we are attempting to repair with the concept of jnani. Let us look at a couple more extracts which indicate something about Plotinus's experience (we are indebted to O'Brien for pointing out the personal nature of these passages):
The chief difficulty is this: awareness of the One comes to us neither by knowing nor by the pure thought that discovers the other intelligible things, but by a presence transcending knowledge. When the soul knows something, it loses its unity; it cannot remain simply one because knowledge implies discursive reason and discursive reason implies multiplicity. The soul then misses the One and falls into number and multiplicity.
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To obtain the vision is solely the work of him who desires to obtain it . If he does not arrive at contemplation, if his soul does not achieve awareness of that life that is beyond, if the soul does not feel a rapture within it like that of the lover come to rest in his love, if, because of his closeness to the One, he receives its true light—his whole soul made luminous—but is still weighted down and his vision frustrated, if he does not rise alone but carries within him something alien to the One, if he is not yet sufficiently unified, if he has not yet risen far but is still at a distance either because of the obstacles of which we have just spoken or because of the lack of such instruction as would have given him direction and faith in the existence of things beyond, he has no one to blame but himself and should try to become pure by detaching himself from everything.
The One is absent from nothing and from everything. It is present only to those who are prepared for it and are able to receive it, to enter into harmony with it, to grasp and to touch it by virtue of their likeness to it, by virtue of that inner power similar to and stemming from the One when it is in that state in which it was when it originated from the One. Thus will The One be "seen" as far as it can become an object of contemplation. (Enneads, V1,9,4)
Although expressed in the third person, Plotinus is clearly writing from his inner experience of the unitive state (moksha, liberation, nirvana), using the analogy of the lover, and incidentally defining the role of the Master as one who gives "direction and faith in the existence of things beyond." But we note, despite the mention of love, it is detachment that is put forward as the most potent method for apprehending the One. All the same, Plotinus quite naturally uses love again to indicate the happy state of entering the One, calling it the Good in this passage:
Therefore must we ascend once more towards the Good, towards there where tend all souls.
Anyone who has seen it knows what I mean, in what sense it is beautiful. As good, it is desired and towards it desire advances. But only those reach it who rise to the intelligible realm, face it fully, stripped of the muddy vesture with which they were clothed in their descent (just as those who mount to the temple sanctuaries must purify themselves and leave aside their old clothing), and enter in nakedness, having cast off in the ascent all that is alien to the divine. There one, in the solitude of self, beholds simplicity and purity, the existent upon which all depends, towards which all look, by which reality is, life is, thought is. For the Good is the cause of life, of thought, of being.
Seeing , with what love and desire for union one is seized—what wondering delight! If a person who has never seen this hungers for it as for his all, one that has seen it must love and reverence it as authentic beauty, must be flooded with an awesome happiness, stricken by a salutary terror. Such a one loves with a true love, with desires that flame. All other loves than this he must despise and all that once seemed fair he must disdain. (Enneads, I,6,7)
Those with a Christian background might be wondering why we cannot simply replace the 'One' and the 'Good' with the Christian God, and read these passages in that light. We will draw out the implications of this idea later on, but for now it is important to remember that Plotinus lived in a Rome where Christianity and Judaism had yet had little impact. The "One" of Plotinus is the goal of jnani aspirations, whereas the "God" of Christianity is the goal of bhakti aspirations. In the long run there is no difference of course, but paradoxically, to remove these distinctions in the long run, we first have to make them crystal clear. We may even find that the "One" of Plotinus becomes the bridge of understanding between the Christian "God" and the Buddhist "nirvana."
Once again, in this brief introduction to the life and thought of Plotinus, we find a portrait that is at least consistent with buddhahood, or that of a jnani Master. When we include the breadth of his interest and writings we note a very Western characteristic that runs through the jnanis we have so far examined: an interest in the knowledge of the day. Set against the Buddha as revealed in the Pali canon, we can see this as an inclination to the via positiva in thought at least, though in many other ways a renunciative lifestyle is an essential part of the teachings. It may be this combination of a transcendent teaching with a love of learning that prevented the pre-Christian jnanis of the West from creating a religion in the way that the Buddha did. Although learning and scholarly activity of all types sprang up in later Buddhism, the Buddha himself had created a religious movement that was essentially anti-intellectual, and could thus appeal to the many citizens who had no aptitude, opportunity or inclination for learning. Of course, what really made Buddhism a popular religion was the introduction of puja or devotional practices, which it absorbed from the various existing traditions in the different regions of its expansion.
Plotinus praises "detachment" as we saw, but his place on the via positiva / via negativa spectrum is worth considering in a bit more detail. Plotinus devotes a whole treatise called "Against the Gnostics" to refuting their main arguments, particularly that the world itself is corrupt or fallen. True, Plotinus regards the acquisition of a body by the soul as a "descent", an idea common in antiquity and taking various forms including the story of the expulsion from Eden. But he does not like the extreme view of the descent as original sin, a fall into evil, and a matter for lamentation, as we see in this passage (translation, Mackenna):
To those who assert that creation is the work of the Soul after the failing of its wings, [a reference to Plato's Phaedrus] we answer that no such disgrace could overtake the Soul of the All. If they tell us of its falling, they must tell us also what caused the fall. And when did it take place? If from eternity, then the Soul must be essentially a fallen thing: if at some one moment, why not before that?
We assert its creative act to be a proof not of decline but rather of its steadfast hold. Its decline could consists only in its forgetting the Divine: but if it forgot, how could it create? Whence does it create but from the things it knew in the Divine? If it creates from the memory of that vision, it never fell. Even supposing it to be in some dim intermediate state, it need not be supposed more likely to decline: any inclination would be towards its Prior; in an effort to the clearer vision. If any memory at all remained, what other desire could it have than to retrace the way?
What could it have been planning to gain by world-creating? Glory? That would be absurd — a motive borrowed from the sculptors of our earth.
Finally, if the Soul created by policy and not by sheer need of its nature, by being characteristically the creative power — how explain the making of this universe?
And when will it destroy the work? If it repents of its work, what is it waiting for? If it has not yet repented, then it will never repent: it must be already accustomed to the world, must be growing more tender towards it with the passing of time. (Enneads, II,9,4)
This defence of the manifest world is not yet the celebration of Walt Whitman, but it is positive indeed when placed alongside the Buddha's indifference to it. From Porphyry's account we gain a sense of Plotinus's presence as benign, a quality also ascribed to Whitman. And is it a coincidence that O'Brien should end his introduction to the Essential Plotinus with this quote from Whitman: "This is no book, cammerade. Who touches this touches a man ..." This sentiment also goes to the heart of our approach to Plotinus, and all the great spiritual teachers we have touched upon:— to recreate their benign presence.
Having identified four great Western jnani Masters, or "lost buddhas"; Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates and Plotinus, we would be surprised if a spiritual tradition had not grown up that perpetuated something of their teachings, and we find it of course in Neoplatonism. Our analysis suggests in fact that Plato was the weakest link in this chain, not because of an inferior intellect, but because his intellect overshadowed his direct experience of jnani. That he has lent his name to this religious tradition should alert us to its inherent contradictions, at least from the perspective of jnani.
Neoplatonism forms a jnani undercurrent in the West after the rise of Christianity. If, as we shall explore later, Christianity is the tree of bhakti in the West, then Neoplatonism is the jnani vine that wraps itself around the branches and sometimes even seems to be the visible part.
It is not certain that Neoplatonism would have been the force that it was without Plotinus, but there is no doubt that he avidly used all the elements of the Greek inheritance, even if it was to refute some of them. Hence a common misconception that his ideas derive in some way from Plato. For sure the outer form and use of metaphor may come from Plato, but Plotinus has his own inner illumination, and simply uses the material to hand. He lives in an ambience where this was natural for any religious or thinking person to do so, and Porphyry tells in his account of the common practice for the sensitive and thoughtful individual to seek out the "philosophers" of the day. What makes a striking contrast with the Buddha is the unusual insistence of the Buddha in rejecting the spiritual language of his day, though he cannot do it fully of course.
With the gradual decline of the Roman Empire and the ascendancy of the Catholic Church as a unifying religious force across Europe, the spiritual and intellectual ambience of Plotinus's time changed dramatically. Most of the Neoplatonist texts, including the Enneads, were lost, or survived only in Muslim strongholds of culture and learning. It was not until the Renaissance that Neoplatonism recovered its vibrancy, and the lost texts were gathered and translated, mainly due to the efforts of Marcilio Ficino and the Florentine Academy that he founded. A few Neoplatonist texts and traditions did survive and influence what is now called the Dark Ages, including Plato's cosmological work the Timaeus, and Plotinus's Beauty.
We will see in a later section how Neoplatonism as a jnani tradition within the bhakti context of Christianity helped to shape some of the crucial historical transitions in Western history.
