Salvation

Salvation

Author: 观复·钧天

  Salvation is the pursuit of a higher material or spiritual state by people dissatisfied with their present condition. It begins with an awareness that one must save oneself. Along the way, the external force of “salvation by others” may either help or hinder that effort. Its outcome is deliverance, and the highest form of deliverance is awakening: recognizing that things have always been as they are, that free will is as it is, that the natural environment is as it is, and that the course of history is as it is.

  Within finite time and space, salvation is indispensable and runs through the whole of human existence. Humanity confronts the infinite with the finite: finite time and space face infinite time and space; finite perception faces infinite vastness; a finite system of knowledge faces an infinite one. In Free and Easy Wandering, Zhuangzi writes, “Small understanding cannot reach great understanding; a short life cannot know a long life.” The small cannot comprehend the great, while the great can contain and understand the small. Human beings continually move from the small toward the great, approaching facts and truth one step at a time. Our awareness of self-salvation is a kind of “rational fatalism.” Humanity fails in its confrontation with fate because of “the contradiction between finite and infinite knowledge.” In this sense, every act of salvation is a movement toward the infinite, a shedding of delusion, and a step closer to facts and truth.

  Yet humanity also regards itself as the most intelligent of all beings in the Universe, and there is something moving about our advance toward the infinite. We do not march proudly in triumph, because the future can never be fully known. Nor do we sink into sorrow and despair, because people always retain a spiritual impulse to rise. What we feel is closer to a blend of sadness and excitement: we know that we are entering an unknown infinity, even as we know that any of it may or may not be true. We cannot know whether we will succeed. And so we simply keep walking, onward into the infinite.

  Beyond desire lie spiritual needs that distinguish humans from animals. These needs exist at different levels, but the most basic are shared to some extent; what varies is how people satisfy them. Some say that spiritual needs are social and psychological needs. Strictly speaking, that is not quite accurate. They do have a social dimension and a diachronic one. They also carry a degree of personal subjectivity, as the need for art shows: some people are drawn to music, some to painting, and others to sculpture. None of this changes the fact that humanity’s most basic spiritual needs are universal. They have existed throughout human history and are present in everyone. People in every age, including you and me, encounter these needs at different levels. What can satisfy them? Facing them directly; obtaining what can fulfill us; and awakening—recognizing our own needs, understanding what they are and how they may be met, and grasping our lives through thought and being. Zhuangzi and his celebrated Free and Easy Wandering and “Zhuang Zhou Dreams of Being a Butterfly”