God the Beautiful

Ananda, the first discipline of the Buddha, asked him, 8216;8216;Lord, is the contemplation of the Beautiful half of the holy life?8217;...

Ananda, the first discipline of the Buddha, asked him, 8216;8216;Lord, is the contemplation of the Beautiful half of the holy life?8217;8217; The Buddha replied, 8216;8216;No, Ananda, it is the whole of the holy life 8212; contemplation of the Beautiful, meditating on the Beautiful8217;8217;. Thus, Beauty and Beatitude merge with the Beautiful One to form one whole, where the duality of the subject and the object dissolves into the consciousness of the Beautiful.

In Bertolt Brecht8217;s play on Galileo, one character makes the telling remark that it is the consciousness of beauty that leads Galileo to the search for truth. Thus, the search for the Beautiful is also the search for Truth, so that the aesthetic and spiritual experiencing of Beauty and beatitude gains moral meaning and sanction when it unites with the search for Truth. So that 8216;8216;Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty8217;8217;, as Keats summed up so succinctly.

The Radha-Krishna lila as expressed in Jaidev8217;s 8216;Gita Govinda8217; or in medieval Bhakti poetry also affirms this. It is a poetic and spiritual metaphor which conveys the soul8217;s longing to unite with its God who is the Ultimate Reality.

This very idea of beatitude and longing to unite with the Beautiful One is expressed in the spiritual poems of St. John of the Cross who conveys the idea through the metaphor of the Bride waiting in the darkness of the night for her Bridegroom to come and consummate their love. The fear of not being able to unite with the lover is combined with the joy of the impending union which gives these spiritual poems their depth, poignancy and moral meaning. Rabindranath Tagore had also sung, 8216;8216;O, Sundaro, O Sundaro8217;8217; O the Beautiful One, the Beautiful One!8217;8217;.

Modern man has lost this consciousness of the Beautiful. He has lost or rather decimated this inner consciousness of Beauty by his constant hankering after wealth and power, not realising that true power is the moral power that one gains through one8217;s pursuit of Truth which is also the quest for Beauty.

Thus, his inner loss of beauty has led to the creation of an ugly world that is chaotic and meaningless. If he had retained his consciousness of beauty, he would have created a beautiful world, where inner beauty would be expressed in outer manifestations of constructed reality.

Modern man is bound within the narrow limits of a finite world although both science and spirituality speak of a world that extends to infinity. Modern man should leave his narrow concerns and strive to touch this infinite in him.