Chapter 10- The Ineffability of Transcendence and Nothingness The God is No-Thing An Apophatic Assertion: An Introduction for Humankind’s Transpersonal Actualization– revised -. Copyright Rodger Ricketts Psy.D.,2023. All rights reserved. Protected by international copyright conventions. No part of this chapter may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever, or stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, without express permission of the Authorpublisher, except in the case of brief quotations with due acknowledgement.
Chapter 10
We have heard the phrase “I just don’t know how to describe it” when we attempt to put into words what we have directly experienced. Apophatic theology wonders about the same thing, but on a different level, of how to speak about the transcendent reality as different from cataphatic theology, which describes “God” or the divine by using affirmations or positive statements. Mystics have often insisted that their experiences of transcendence or divinity are beyond the realm of language and concepts.“God is greater than anything that we can conceive,” as said by Saint Anselm.
Many thinkers throughout history have recognized this impossibility of positively describing the All, commonly called “God,” and instead affirm its ultimate mystery, incomprehensibility, and ineffability. For example, in the magazine Fiddlehead, author Tim Lilburn states, “The deepest truth in all things is numinous or mysterious, these Apophatic masters taught, beyond reason, beyond language.” In The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition: Plato to Eriugena (2015), the academic Deirdre Carabine wrote,
The Apophatic or negative way stresses God’s absolute transcendence and unknowability in such a way that we cannot say anything about the Divine essence because God is so totally beyond being. The dual concept of the immanence and transcendence of God can help us to understand the simultaneous truth of both ‘ways’ to God: at the same time, as God is immanent, God is also transcendent. At the same time, as God is knowable, God is also unknowable. God cannot be thought of as one or the other only.
In his book Language & Silence (1998), essayist, literary critic and teacher George Steiner writes,
In Buddhism […] the highest, purest reach of the contemplative act is that which has learned to leave language behind it. The ineffable lies beyond the frontiers of the word. It is only by breaking through the walls of language that visionary observance can enter the world of total and immediate understanding. Where such understanding is attained, the truth needs no longer suffer the impurities and fragmentation that speech necessarily entails.
The Dhamma or Truth (the teachings of the Buddha) is “profound, hard/difficult to see and to fathom, peaceful and sublime, unattainable by mere reasoning/not within the sphere of reasoning, subtle, to be experienced by the wise” (M.I.167). In the Buddha’s apophatic discourse, there are two levels of truth: conventional and transcendent. Language and theories are only valid at the conventional dualistic level, where they can make logically coherent assertions. However, at the ultimate non-dualistic level, language can only point to the truth that must be directly experienced and realized. The teacher, monk and philosopher Nāgārjuna suggests a total relinquishing of all views: “I prostrate to Gautama Buddha, Who through compassion, Taught the true doctrine, Which leads to the relinquishing of all views” (see Examinations of Views, MMK XXVII). In fact, the apophatic tradition warns of the relativity of concepts and against the reification of ideas and experiences.
Christianity has long struggled with the problem of creating a linguistic description of “God.” There is the easily recognized problem that, since language is based on worldly/human experiences and categories, it is, therefore, impossible to reflect a transcendent existence. In other words, since language is a finite and relativistic tool, it cannot describe an infinite and transcendent “existence.” As theologian Emmett Fox wrote, using Christian terms, “Material language is made to fit material needs, and it simply will not satisfactorily express true spiritual ideas.” For these, we need the new Tongue of which Jesus spoke. We seldom realize how much we really are in the grips of the dictionary. Fox emphasized that we have certain experiences, and then we have language, with its hard-and-fast boundaries, that says, “You shall not say that wonderful thing—you shall say only this—and we find on paper the pale, lifeless shadow of the thing that came to life in our soul.” While an experience is direct and knowable, our description of it is abstracted and conceptualized.
There is a wealth of apophatic examples in the Buddhist canon, for instance, in Saṃyutta 43. Nibbāna or Nirvāṇa (the highest spiritual state and the ultimate goal of Buddhism) is negatively qualified as unconditioned, uninclined, taintless, non-manifested, deathless, unelaborated. This shows the avoidance of categorically defining or describing a reality that is ultimately beyond linguistic description, as it is unconditioned, whereas language is always conditioned.
These apophatic traditions open easily to non-duality. The non-duality experience is the realization of unity after the cognitively constructed veil of duality is lifted. Besides the Christian examples, in Buddhism, sunyata—the experience of the void or nothingness—is taught as being beyond conceptions or categorical thought, and, like the Taoist Dao, it remains inexhaustible and ever-present.
When questioned about the nature of awakening, and since the experience is ineffable, the Buddha did not theorize or use conceptualization. The Buddha saw no truth in anything beyond contact or direct experience for, as is commonly taught in Buddhism, no theories, no conceptions, and no experience can go beyond contact and remaining meaningful. The Buddha teaches how to see “things as they are,” or better, “things as they have come to be thus” without substantial, ontological essences.
Saññā or Language as a Necessarily Biased Cognitive Tool
By understanding the nature of language and conceptualization, awakened individuals are trained through Bhavana or cultivation to a detachment from the intellect, allowing them to experience reality beyond the limitations of their thoughts and mental constructs. Especially by analyzing the thorough teachings of the Buddha, we can develop a fruitful discourse about the apophatic traditions’ insights into the limitations of language trying to describe the ineffable.
Knowing the relation of the Buddhist word saññā to language is crucial for the proper understanding of linguistics. Saññā is described as a label, perception, allusion, act of memory or recognition, interpretation, and language is meant to be a tool for our relative and efficient functioning in the world. Concepts belong to the field of language and to saññā. They have their own natural context in which they function well. Therefore, we can perceive and recognize the world in a way that reflects our past experiences.
Saññā works by grasping the main feature of an object while ignoring other less obvious features. It works by categorizing, labelling and finding similarities and differences. This allows the classification of objects in the same groups and for comparisons among them. This simplifies our experience in a necessary way. Otherwise, we would become overburdened with an excess of information and survive poorly if at all in the world. What one perceives, one expresses, but in a feedback loop, our expressions also influence our perception of the world.
When someone tries to describe the “ultimate reality” through perceptions and language, they are committing an error of metaphysics: trying to go beyond the realm of language while using language. As the religious teacher Anthony de Mello expressed it, “Every word, every image used for God is a distortion more than a description.”Instead, the best that one can do is to recognize that at some point of understanding, the utility of explanation, perception and conceptualization ends, and then one remains silent.
Here lies an important understanding of the apophatic rejection of metaphysics and the rejection of developing theories about what exists and how we know that it exists. Language does not truly represent the world. When one understands the workings of language, one no longer attaches significance to metaphysical theories. For example, according to early Buddhism, the realm of metaphysics is created by seeking “ultimate” correlates for language, which should only be properly understood functionally. Since the teachings of the Buddha are expressed through language and language is based on saññā, neither is meant to represent “ultimate reality.” Instead, the Buddhist view is that liberating insight takes place when thoughts and perceptions cease (even though one’s senses and vedanā, or felt experience, are still functioning normally).
Knowing experience, or the transcendent, has nothing to do with discrimination, analysis, or being separated from it. When saññā and language fall away, one can no longer speak of discernment. Even if one says, “This state is beyond words and cannot be expressed by language; it is timeless, spaceless, God, love, Ultimate, never-ending, etc.,” one is still construing, describing, and misappropriating language. More succinctly, all one can do is remain silent, leaving language, with all its limitations, to merely indicate a way to transcending it, using it as a “raft.”
A useful analogy the Buddha used to describe his teachings was that they are like a raft that carries you to the opposite shore of awakening. The raft is needed to cross the river, but a wise person would not carry the raft around after making it across to the other shore. Use the raft to cross to the other shore but do not become attached to it. You must be able to let it go. Also, all words about transcendent realities are just a raft, hints, or guideposts. Similarly, do not hold onto words as if they are the realities. The Buddha many times stated that his Dhamma or teachings are solely a “raft” that performs the function of reaching the goal of awakening, and apart from that, one remains silent about all else. His teachings describe the practical path leading to the eradication of suffering. In almost all situations, the Buddha limited himself to presenting the path to liberation and to correcting others when they overextended and misused language.
We should remember the helpful analogy from Thich Nath Hahn and the Zen tradition: “A finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. The finger is needed to know where to look for the moon, but if you mistake the finger for the moon itself, you will never know the real moon.” In other words, the moon represents the true transcendent emptiness experience, and the Dhamma, or teachings, are represented by the finger. The Zen master speaks about the Dhamma or teachings as the finger which points to the true transcendent “mind,” and it was his disciple’s mistake to suppose that the true “mind” could be known only by the rational abstraction of the teachings. Instead, words create confusion and there are no words for the deepest experience. While not everything is unsayable in words, the transcendent truth is.
In this chapter, Enlightenment is understanding your true nature. It’s the realization that you are not a separate ego, you are part of the eternal, unbounded energy of the universe. While the Buddha’s teachings describe the clear and practical path leading to the eradication of Dukkha, or dissatisfaction and alienation, in fact, language and conceptual thought are insufficient for achieving awakening and ultimate reality which is beyond the reach of language.As theologian Rudolf Otto said:The holy is ineffable and cannot be fully comprehended or articulated through language. In many early Buddhist texts, there is an acknowledgment of the difficulty of articulating the insights that led to the Buddha’s awakening or characterizing the state of awakening itself because they are beyond the limits of language and conceptuality. In the next chapter, I will demonstrate how awakening is an experience that can be understood through an apophatic interpretation of spirituality.
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