Obedience

About 5 pages (1,420 words)

Obedience Summary

Obedience

OBEDIENCE consists in the act of voluntary submission to an authority. Religious obedience, the subject of this article, is therefore the voluntary submission to a specifically religious authority, and its different forms correspond to differences in the types and levels of such authority. In many world religions, authority rests with a single principle, being, or god, and religious obedience is accordingly due to an all-embracing law or to the divine will. But even in these cases, where there is clearly a single and absolute source of authority, the obligation of obedience may be expressed on a variety of levels. Thus in Hinduism, for instance, obedience to the Laws of Manu is enjoined upon all, but at the individual level a disciple's obedience to his guru, or, at a corporate level, to the rules of his sect, religious establishment, or maṭha may be equally or even more important.

Obedience in Christianity can similarly be seen as extending from the general principles of the Decalogue, through the observance of the rules of the church or monastery, to the individual's obedience of his own immediate ecclesiastical superior. In Islam, obedience may extend from the observance of the sharī'ah, to the rules of one's ṭarīqah, and finally to obeying one's spiritual mentor or pīr. Likewise in Buddhism, apart from the moral precepts, the corporate rules of the saṃgha are to be observed by the monks and nuns, and even though Buddhism generally places less emphasis on the unique master-disciple relationship common in Hinduism, even here each novitiate is assigned initially to an individual elder.

Differences in the forms of religious association will also result in different forms of obedience. In religions that continue to be organized along the lines of natural kinship groups, religious obedience will often be a simple extension of one's normal obligations to one's family. Thus in Confucianism the filial relationship becomes paradigmatic for obedience of all kinds. But even when natural forms of association are left behind, obedience may continue to be understood metaphorically in terms of spiritual parentage. In the mystical traditions of several religions, including Christianity, the spiritual mentor is often compared to a father. Each individual, or even the religious community as a whole, may be visualized as undergoing a period of religious tutelage that requires the unquestioning obedience of a child. In many cases, the rite of religious initiation closely parallels that of birth and is often considered a kind of rebirth. Just as children are not supposed to disobey, so the neophytes undergoing initiation or puberty rites must behave humbly, obeying their instructors and accepting arbitrary punishment without complaint. Here one thinks of the obedience that Zen monks owe to their rōshi.

With the spiritual coming-of-age of an individual or a community, as in the biological parallel of growth during adolescence, obedience becomes more problematic, and at times even self-defeating. One encounters both the problem of disobedience and the more subtle problem of the conflict between the "spirit" and the "letter." The latter problem is illustrated by the Christian attitude toward Jewish law and by the Buddhist rejection of the cumbersome Hindu codes of conduct. More enlightened approaches emerge at the individual level in which disobedience becomes a higher form of obedience. Thus the Hindu religious leader Rāmānuja (eleventh century CE) disobeyed his master by making public formerly esoteric doctrines of salvation in order that all might be saved. Such "disobedient" transcendence of the conventional letter of the law is will illustrated by a Zen master's response to his disciple, who one evening questioned the propriety of his master's carrying a lady across a flooded rivulet that morning because it infringed the Vinaya rule against touching women: "I left her on the bank in the morning," he replied, "and you are still carrying her!" Similarly the Chinese sage Mengzi (Mencius) held that a man who would not pull his drowning sister-in-law out of a river, for fear of disobeying the rule that she not be touched, is no better than a wolf.

The appropriateness of obedience, or indeed the very question of what constitutes obedience in a given situation, cannot always be mechanically ascertained. Nevertheless, the consequences of disobedience cannot simply be dismissed. According to the Tibetan tradition, Mi la ras pa (Milarepa) had to suffer the consequences of disobeying his master's orders to the full, which were designed to wear out his karman. Thus although theoretically and retrospectively one may speak of enlightened disobedience, it presents difficulties in practical terms.

Another important issue in relation to obedience pertains to the conflict of different laws or values within a single tradition. This conflict was clearly recognized by the Hindu tradition, which sought to deal with it by relegating such conflicting norms to different historical epochs. The dharma appropriate to one age, it was held, may not be appropriate to another. But even without introducing this historical dimension, such conflict may be recognized as part of the essential tension present within a tradition at any given time, the tension, once again, between the "spirit" and the "letter." The recognition of this tension is exemplified by Confucius's remark to the duke, who had praised the rectitude of a son in testifying against his father in a case of theft: "The honest men of my country are different from this. The father covers up for his son, the son covers up for his father—and there is honesty in that too." The case is similar with Islam, which requires unquestioning obedience to the Qurʾān, but at the same time provides for ittiḥād.

A closely related issue is that of law and freedom; how much freedom is to be allowed in the interpretation of the law? Is obedience to the law compatible with a relative freedom in its interpretation? Or does true obedience require a "rigorist" reading of the letter of the law, with the interpreter being allowed only the absolute minimum of freedom? This issue has been particularly important in the Christian tradition, where a broad range of positions has been defined.

The importance of obedience in religious life is undoubtedly due in part to its importance for the successful operation of family, society, and polity in general. However, obedience also functions as a specifically religious virtue. The triple vows of poverty, chastity, and cenobitic obedience in the context of Christian monasticism offer a possible example of such specifically religious obedience. However, all forms of cenobitic monasticism, as distinguished from the eremitic, involve rules necessary to the maintenance of a community and may therefore merely reflect the need for the maintenance of order. No such reductionistic explanation is possible, however, in the practice of spiritual and ascetic disciplines. Here obedience has an exclusively religious goal, as an essential precondition of spiritual knowledge. Thus when a Greek king wished to learn the wisdom of India from the gymnosophists, the first thing required of him was obedience: "No one coming in the drapery of European clothes—cavalry cloak and broad-brimmed hat and top-boots, such as Macedonians wore—could learn their wisdom. To do that he must strip naked and learn to sit on the hot stones beside them." Obedience may however play a role at the end of the path as well, if it is understood spiritually as surrender. In this sense it constitutes the annihilation of the individual ego which constitutes the last obstacle to the plenary experience. According to the modern Hindu mystic, Ramaṇa Maharshi (1879–1950): "The disciple surrenders himself to the master. That means there is no vestige of individuality retained by the discipline. If the surrender is complete all sense of individuality is lost and there is thus no cause for misery. The eternal being is only happiness, that is revealed" (Talks with Sri Ramaṇa Maharshi, 1984, p. 318). Thus while obedience is the necessary prerequisite for entry upon the spiritual path, it is also in a sense the goal. This is particularly clear in the case of Islam, which literally means "surrender." Here man is viewed as having his final end outside himself, in the transcendence of the divine. True peace is accordingly to be found only in surrender, in true and total obedience to the divine will.