The Bridging Paths of Faith
The ritual span of place in Asian Religion
“The Lord pervades every heart. He dwells concealed in the waters, the land, all that is in between the heavens and earth.” (Adi Granth Scripture in McDaniel, 2022a)
Faith is often a place we turn to build bridges between places and people. These bridges might span the limbic spaces between the chaotic samsara of earthly existence and the peaceful calm of the divine, the locus of the fires of our internal faith and the broader external communal beliefs of those who feel the same, or the faith we form around our notions of past, present, and future. We share epic stories of the bridges between ourselves and the divine, of Heaven and Hell, of heroic lives and what follows upon death. We use faith to unite division and find the common ground across differences of place. We travel in the real world to places of worship through habitual, local ritual or through larger efforts of pilgrimage. Yet whatever form our travel takes, faith acts as a life-giving binding agent between people, drawing places and spaces closer together, bringing us nearer to the divine, and connecting our belief with that which we seek.
There are three distinct forms of bridging which surface in Asian religious practice. Faith as ritual bridge between places internal and external. Faith as bridge of liberation between and over the chaotic places of past, present, and future. And faith as bridge for collapsing distance between ourselves and the divine. Each motivates an approach where we can draw powerful commonality of place across different faiths, while retaining and respecting the individual specificity of ritual and worship within religions.
First, bridges of faith between the internal and external appear prominently in Vedic ritual, focusing on the manipulation and transference of heat. Early Vedic ritual emphasizes one’s internal fires, one’s ascetic heat in the form of one’s tejas, one’s glowing inner power (McDaniel, 2022b). Through ascetic practice such as harsh physical austerity, yogic ritual or breathing exercises, disciples might churn one’s inner fire, stoking it in service of bridging the space between one’s Atman, one’s soul, and the Brahma, the oversoul (McDaniel, 2022c). It’s bridging ritual which motivates the closing of space between inner and outer existence, drawing the ultimate nearer, and connecting the inner fire of one’s soul to the larger communal and divine fires of the oversoul. And through this manipulation of heat and fire, Vedic faith bridges the space between earthly existence as a place, and the continued sustenance of the divine (McDaniel, 2022c). Transcending physical scale, it spans personal microcosm and ultimate macrocosm, and through adherence to Vedic texts and ritual, ultimately allows worshippers to place faith in their belief in manipulating their immediate surroundings such as weather or natural experiences otherwise out of one’s control (McDaniel, 2022c).
This ritual casting out of bridging connection between Atman and Brahma, the bandhu, aligns our individualized, small personal places with the cosmic spaces of the divine, and the power to span this gap fosters environments in which disciples might thrive during their time on earth. Ascetic practices such as fasting, mediation, or the harsh physical austerities of not bathing or growing out one’s hair and fingernails are all designed to increase the heat of one’s body, and in doing so, increase the churning power of one’s chakras, the wheels of glowing energy which turn through our bodies (McDaniel, 2022c). Similarly, rituals such as the Agnihotra, the manipulation of a small, intimate fire, where oblations are given up while mantras are recited, motivate further reduction in space between the places of Atman and Brahma (McDaniel, 2022c). Instructions for such bridging rituals appear in the four texts of the early Vedic corpus of the Samhitas, the hymns to the Gods, the Brahmanas, a set of ritual instructions, the Aranyakas, a set of forest teachings centered around how to control one’s body, and the Upanishads, philosophical reflections upon the Vedic faith itself (McDaniel, 2022b). Through the corpus, bridging ritual not only spans the inner Atman and the externally divine Brahma through instruction in how to cast out our bandhu, it also folds together the places of past and the present, with such teachings preserved and handed down through generations of practice, but also shaping our ritualistic present and our aspiration for the future. Vedic faith, and in its later form as Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Sikhism, offers ritual instruction through the manipulation of heat to bridge the places of internal and external, and seeks to draw believers closer to the divine by collapsing the distance between the two.
Second, faith also acts as a bridge of liberation between the past, present and the future, freeing us from the samsaric maelstrom of life, and offering refuge and salvation from the very suffering of being alive. But with so many distractions, desires and designs on life, our challenge in achieving the bridge of liberation, our moksha (McDaniel, 2022d), is to achieve self-knowledge, in turn reducing one’s impact and action to an ultimate natural state of equanimity and harmony with the world (McDaniel, 2022e). Through slowly reducing one’s impact, as appears strongly in Jain faith, we draw closer to breaking the samsaric cycle of reincarnation, revealing our true existence and the souls of others.
The Jain teachings of Mahavira reject the Brahmanic asceticism associated with Hinduism and the speculative texts of the Upanishads, in search of changing the focus of these teachings to emphasize the reduction of karma (McDaniel, 2022e). That past and current action strongly inform future consequence, and that in stressing the reduction of impact, and by living a peaceful, meditative life, we inflict less damage upon the world, suffer reduced consequence, and collapse the places of past, present, and future together. Jainism does this through the Dharma, its narrative teachings, itself a Sanskrit derived word for the essential in the past which is carried down (McDaniel, 2022e). The ethics of Jain Dharma motivate the idea that all humans have a Jiva, a soul, or life force similar to the notion of atman we see in Hinduism, and that one’s Jiva transfers from body to body over time upon death and over time, aspiring to an existence of radical equanimity with all living beings. But if the natural state of the Jiva is a state of stillness (McDaniel, 2022e), Jain faith acts as a bridge of calm and liberation over the chasm of chaotic samsara and suffering motivated by the impact one has upon the world. It spans the gaps between the handed-down teachings of the past in the form of the Dharma, one’s actions in the present, and the consequences of both for the future.
But in this contemplative peace amidst the swirling chaos around us, the reduction in one’s impact upon the world inevitably has a strong moral component, where everything we do in life has consequences intimately woven with place. All impactful actions and reactions generate karma, and cumulatively add to the sum of a person’s existence, which in turn determines our destined fate in future existences. Actions of faith exist in the present, are blended with the actions of others and with the past, and strongly inform what becomes of us in the future, even if that future happens in the places after death.
Finally, faith can be a bridge for reducing the distance between the places of earthly existence and the site of the divine. This is particularly relevant in animistic faiths such as Shinto, which asserts that objects and places can hold memories, and within those memories are traces of the divine (McDaniel, 2022f). In Shinto, there is no explicit physical place of divinity which we seek to bridge as in Hinduism, Jainism, or even the Heaven of Christianity, as the divine exists in objects all around us, and can be invoked, worshipped, and propositioned by that which we can see and touch. But as in Jainism, it fosters a large degree of respect for the natural world and the places around us, and where the beautiful empty and quiet spaces of meditative temples consciously blend places of worship with places of nature (McDaniel, 2022f). Starkly different from the enormous imposing stone cathedrals of western Christianity. In animistic faith, there is no bridging space to cross outside of reverence for the individual ritual and worship of kami, the spirits which dwell in trees, rocks, streams, and other features of the environment. Yet in collapsing the space between divine and earthly, animism firmly attaches itself to the specificity of place. Kami are associated with specific environmental features, tethering the faith to individual locations (McDaniel, 2022f), a consequence which has motivated Shinto to stay largely confined to Japan. If one can cast out one’s bandhu from anywhere in the Hindu world, animism pulls the disciple’s faith into a focused and more specific means of literal, physical connection. In honoring the land, there is a high degree of respect which Shinto practitioners associate with the appeasement and worship of natural spirits, and explicitly respects the ancestry of place.
Sikhism centers itself on the similarly omnipresent faith that God is everyone and everything. All the earth, the universe, and in the hearts and bodies of every person. In drawing themselves closer to the divine, Sikhs also practice the purity of thought and bridging to divine presence similarly motivated by animism, that it’s our role as humans to concentrate upon the divine order of things, the Hukam, and reflect upon the spaces between nature and ourselves (McDaniel, 2022a). Observing what is immediately around us reveals God’s presence, and through the teachings of the Adi Granth and the reflections of Guru Nanak, we can calm ourselves, steady ourselves, and finally hear the word of God (McDaniel, 2022a). When we do this, God no longer becomes abstract and distant, He becomes near, collapsing the space between the place of divine and our place in the world. And if God is close, there is no need for symbols and statues as we find in Christianity, and where we feel God’s presence, but know there is a space between Him and us. If, as Guru Nanak says, the one God dwells within all, He will bestow his grace upon you through a calm mind and acute method of ritual listening (McDaniel, 2022a).
If animism motivates a physical proximity to the divine, and Sikhism articulates a divine omnipresence, then the final ritual of Zoroastrianism’s sky burial provides a literal and beautiful ritual fusion of earthly existence and the natural divine. Instead of cremating a body upon death, or interring it underground, Zoroastrian faith exposes the body to the elements atop a Tower of Silence, where the natural processes of nature are given the gift of one’s body, of one’s flesh, and disciples truly become one with the place of nature, consumed by its very inhabitants (McDaniel, 2022g).
In conclusion, faith is intimately, deeply, richly interwoven with ideas of place in Asian religion. We use faith in Hinduism as a bridging framework to stimulate and motivate closer connections to the divine through ascetic ritual, stoking our internal fires to draw our atman closer to the brahma. And we draw insight, guidance, and comfort from the Vedic corpus to span the gaps between ourselves and the oversoul. We lean on faith in Jainism and the teachings of the Dharma as a bridge to liberation from the samsaric suffering of past, present, and future existence, reducing our karma to minimize our impact upon the world and achieve the moksha we all seek. And when the divine is all around as in animistic faiths such as Shinto, we use our beliefs to collapse the distance between the place of our existence and the locus of the divine. The divine is all around in Sikhism, and physically bound together in the finish for Zoroastrians.
The nature of the places we travel to and surround ourselves with varies across faiths, but it is faith itself which serves as the bridging agent between our lived existence and the divine. This faith can be motivated through elemental forces or ritual behavior, harsh ascetic austerity, or quiet meditative practice. But common to all is the desire to draw the divine closer, to span the gap between the here of life and the there of God. And when we find such common ground between and across faiths, we intimately attach ourselves to the reconciliation of conflict and the building of bridges between not just believers, but all people.
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