Reflections of Spiritual Narratives

This narrative illustrates the connections between spirituality, writing, and health. It does not promote a specific religion but demonstrates strength people gain from believing in a higher power. Prayers with hospital patients and the search for connections more than coincidences illustrate how people find and maintain hope and faith when presented with tragic events such as the recent pandemic. Each reader may find encouragement while reflecting on and following an individual spiritual path.

Landscape and Divinity Spoken in the Same Breath

From where can we draw inspiration to cultivate an intimate sensibility into the spiritual nature of landscape, the foundation for designing gardens for meditation and healing? Through various spiritual lenses, this inquiry penetrates fundamental grounds for our subtle relationship with landscape. Beginning with excerpts of a private audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama at Middlebury College, at which I present my proposed plans and designs for Milarepa Center in Barnet, Vermont, this inquiry looks into the profound links between spiritual inquiry and the practice of designing gardens, making design of landscape integral to a spiritual path, and the profound relationship between Landscape and Divinity. It is presented in three parts: (1) spiritual inspiration; (2) setting terms on the table; and (3) expressions of sacred landscape.

One or None? Truth and Self-Transformation for Śaṅkara and Kamalaśīla

This article explores how two influential 8th-century Indian philosophers, Śaṅkara and Kamalaśīla, treat the threefold scheme of learning, reasoning, and meditation in their spiritual path philosophies. They have differing institutional and ontological commitments: the former, who helped establish Advaita Vedānta as the religious philosophy of an elite Hindu monastic tradition, affirms an unchanging “self” (ātman) identical to the “world-essence” (brahman); the latter, who played a significant role in the development of Buddhist monasticism in Tibet, denies both self and essence. Yet, they share a concern with questions of truth and the means by which someone could gain access to it, such as what, if anything, meditation contributes to knowledge and its acquisition. By exploring their answers to this and related questions, including how discursive and conceptual practices like learning, reasoning, and meditation could generate nonconceptual knowledge or knowledge of the nonconceptual, this essay shows the difficulty of separating “philosophical” problems of truth from those related to self-transformation or “spirituality,” as Michel Foucault defines the terms. It also reassesses, as a framework for comparison, the well-known contrast between “gradual” and “sudden” approaches to the achievement of liberating knowledge and highlights them as tensions we still struggle to resolve today.

The travel story as the structure-forming basis for Attar poems

There is no consensus among scholars about the Masnavi composition by Farid ad-Din ‛Attar (fl. 12th–13th cent. AD), the great Persian Sufi poet. The question of whether these poems were written spontaneously or whether there is a structure, which was thought out in advance remains open. The article offers an attempt to answer this question. It comprises a comparative analysis of the structure of three Masnavi poems by Farid ad-Din ‛Attar: Mantiq at-Tayr (“Language of the Birds”), Musibat-nameh (“Book of Suffering”) and Ilahi-nameh (“Book of God”). The starting point is the poem Mantiq at-Tayr, which illustrates the ‛Attar concept of the so-called “valleys”, i.e. the stages, which mark the spiritual path of those striving for the Eternal and Divine Truth. This Path is alluded to by the flight of birds. All three Masnavis are considered in the article as a unity where the pivotal points of the narrative are determined by the stages of the path described in the Mantiq at-Tayr. At the same time, the poems do not duplicate, however, enlarge and enrich each other.

The Empires of the East

The early sixteenth century saw the rise of three distinct Islamic empires, ruled by the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. In each, rulers had to find ways to legitimize their authority and their expansionist agenda, co-opting elites while also responding to the exigencies of economic change and military developments. The Ottomans became increasingly identified with Sunni Islam and the Safavids with Shi’ite interpretations of faith, but all three empires were religiously heterogeneous and they needed to cultivate an administrative structure and ideal of service which was not simply tied to a particular spiritual path. In the Ottoman empire there was an important debate about the relationship between those policies and principles which seemed necessary for stability and prosperity, and the demands of the divine law as understood by religious elites. The Mughal emperor Akbar, on the other hand, countered religious orthodoxy with his own version of saintliness and divine favour. In contrast to the lands of Western Europe, there was little interest in developing a concept of natural law whose purpose was earthly flourishing rather than spiritual fulfilment. Political thinking in the Islamic empires tended to emphasize universal principles, although in the Ottoman lands there came to be a recognition of the particular circumstances and challenges faced by that Empire.

The Spiritual Path of Pilgrimage Tourism for Sustainable Development: Case-Desa Astana-Cirebon, Indonesia

The Cirebon region which is located in the province of West Java, Indonesia has valuable artifacts and sites as a source of knowledge. Conservation in this area has not been actualized yet, even though it has potential for pilgrimage tourism destinations. The purpose of this research is to describe the spiritual path of Cirebon pilgrimage tourism. The method used is a case study, this method is more operational to find out why and how the spiritual path of the Cirebon pilgrimage was formed. The findings of this study are the existence of a spiritual path that connects the cemetery locations and sites such as: Talun Keramat Cemetery is located in Cirebon Girang Village, Talun District, Syekh Magelung Sakti Site is located in Karangkendal Village, Kepetakan District, Nyi Mas Gandasari Tomb is located in Pangurang Village. Arjawinangun District and one that is very well known to foreign countries is Astana Sunan Gunung Jati in Astana Village, Gunungjati District. The results of the study provide direction for developing a spiritual path to become a Cirebon tourist destination package as well as regional conservation.

Nearness to the Real

This article presents the theory of sainthood found in the writings of Dāwūd al-Qayṣarī (d. 751/1350), a major commentator on the Sufi thought of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240). Building on previous philosophical interpretations of Ibn ʿArabī’s thought to systematize the worldview now known as the “Oneness of Being” (waḥdat al-wujūd), Qayṣarī also developed a sophisticated theory of sainthood that not only described, but explained in detail what a saint was, how to become one, and what made the methods for doing so effective. After a historical introduction, I examine the principles of Qayṣarī’s hagiology in the broader context of his worldview, with special attention to his innovative use of philosophical language. Finally, my analysis of the spiritual path in Qayṣarī’s writings shows the consistency with which his account of Sufi wayfaring reflects these principles, according to which the acquisition of sainthood was a journey from the particular to the universal.

The Concept of Love and The Basis of Its Doctrines Between Maqamat and Haal

Basically, Sufism is the spiritual "path" of the Sufis to achieve eternal happiness. Sufism's orientation is a noble love for Allah SWT. Throughout the history of Sufism, love (isyq) for the Sufis became an ideology as well as a method of spiritual purification. Love restores the essence of human life to the Qur'an and Allah alone so that it has an essential accentuation of spirituality. This research uses a qualitative approach. This type of research is a library of research by collecting and documenting all the data relating to Sufism, love, and teachings, especially in the Qur'an and some Sufi figures. The results of this study revealed the love of a wayfarer (Salik) obtained through the long spiritual journey (suluk) in his life. It includes the prayer and the foundation of his stages (maqaamat), such as repentance (tawba), renunciation (zuhd), patience (ṣabr), gratitude (syukr), and watchfulness (wara'), and his basic doctrines such as fear (khauf) and hope (raja’).

S.N. Durylin’s Easter story “On someone else's grave”: genre update

The article explores poetics of the unpublished Easter story by S.N. Durylin “On an unrelated grave” (1922). The story is important mainly because the author manages to renew the genre not only by returning to the original spiritual meanings, but also presenting the unique ontological project. Taking into account the experience of the predecessors-classics, first of all, A.P. Chekhov and his story “Holy night” (1886), the writer expands possibilities of the biblical subtext by creating an intertextual evangelical plot that unfolds in parallel with the main one. Using modernist experience of L.N. Andreev and M. Gorky, the symbolist writers, Durylin disputes it, disagreeing with travesty and fantastic versions of the interpretation of Easter story. The author depicts the plot of the resurrection of the soul of the main character Andrei Omutov, who, experiencing the tragic death of his mother, thinks about eternity for the first time. The author’s ontological concept, affirming infinity and the absence of boundaries, is expressed by the special construction of the temporal triad “past — present — future”. The idea of transcendental reality, suggesting Absolute, is formed by alternating passages in present and future tense: these are descriptions of mother’ existence and church hymns quotations. In the past tense, the story of hero’s childhood and his mother’s death are given. The spiritual path to the eternal “to be” represents the inner plot of this story. The milestones of this plot are intertextually indicated by Easter exapostillarium, which is quoted three times: in the epigraph, at the time when it sounds at Easter services and, finally, on a grave of a stranger during matin service, conducted by Father Alexander, when the hero’s spiritual resurrection occurs.