The Boundless and the Beating Heart: Friedrich Ruckert's Wisdom of the Brahman Books 1-4 (East-West Bridge Builders)

The Boundless and the Beating Heart is a dialogue with Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), a world-class poet—Gustav Mahler’s favorite—whose lyrics have been set to music nearly 2000 times. I translate the first 4 books of The Wisdom of the Brahman: A Didactic Poem in Fragments (1835–6). It’s a guidebook fashioned by a western Sufi pilgrim, a lyrical imaginer who in a poetic diary is journaling his way toward an understanding of the human condition. The word “Brahman” indicates a solitary thinker, but in this book he doesn’t walk alone. The translator replies to each of Rückert’s religious musings, nature thoughts, reveries, parables, anecdotes, maxims, and jokes with a related original poem in the same lyric form the poet used. A comparative scholar of world scriptures, Rückert wants The Wisdom to be not only broad but deep, so he aims at universal thought-songs not confined to one tradition. His mentor J. W. von Goethe had a similar goal in West-East Divan (1819), and the Sufi sage Ibn Arabi formulated it by saying that all religions are shape-giving containers for Spirit. Rückert’s “Brahman” reads no scripture but that of Nature. Each “gleam” of insight he gets he will make into a “rosary bead” of prayerful poetry with the rounded shape of the changeful horizon. Only the human “heart” can transmit these gifts. Boundless Reality and the unbounded heart, as it beats in rhythmic song, are in dialogue. Goethe offered two more symbols that clarify Rückert’s gleam and bead. Goethe views inhaling and exhaling, concentration and release, as two “gifts of grace,” like the receiving of a gleam and the shaping of it into a poetic bead. I combine this idea with another one, taken from Goethe’s personal myth of Lucifer and God. Seeing Lucifer as repeatedly rebelling against and then returning to God, Goethe thinks we should all live like this, alternating between self-assertion and self-transcendence, between “selving” and “unselving.” This image of contrasting movements reveals the implication of gleam and bead for moral psychology. They are emblems of the thoughtful and the active life. The four “books” of our dialogue develop these seed-ideas. Book I shows Being as activated in Becoming when we alternate between heart and horizon. Book II offers moral psychology, illustrating “selving” and “unselving” in parable-stories. Book III turns toward maxims, free-associative journaling, and humor. Book IV adds to our awareness of the problems of practical life a grateful recognition of the aid given by prior finders of the Boundless in the beating heart.