My process for reading sacred texts
I’ve been spending a considerable amount of time reading various sacred texts. They’re wells of wisdom of such staggering depth. Their treasures remain concealed and woefully beyond reach if we approach them solely via the intellect.
For now, I’ve consolidated on a process that helps me relate to them with the whole of my being. Nothing in this essay is original to me. I’m extremely grateful for the many teachers that have spontaneously appeared (and disappeared!) in my life and pointed the way.
Before discussing the process, we need to spend some time exploring why their interpretation is so challenging.
What is a “sacred” text?
I’m extremely interested in a meta-systemic understanding of wisdom cultivation practices. That is, I’d like to understand the underlying principles and methods of each practice across various traditions, expressed in some common language. I’d like to fruitfully invent new practices as necessary. Ultimately, I aspire to cultivate an ecology of interlocking practices tailored for my modern circumstances.
To do this we need a common definition for “sacredness”. There are likely as many definitions as there are spiritual communities. I prefer John Vervaeke’s definition: a text is sacred if there’s an inexhaustible quality, revealing new insights as the individual grows spiritually. The Pali Canon or the books in the Bible have been sacred to me. Their insights have aided my transformation. When I revisit the same passages after some time, they reveal something that I couldn’t have seen before.
Not all texts serve this function for people. Under this definition, the sacredness of a text isn’t an intrinsic aspect of the text itself, as not everyone can experience it that way. Nor is it solely within the person, since they can’t generate the insights alone. The sacredness of a text is a real relationship between the person and the text. Like all relationships, it can evolve over time and eventually fade when it’s no longer relevant.
Why is going into the depths of sacred texts hard?
These texts were written for audiences radically different from us. There is a social, cultural, political and linguistic chasm between us and the primary audience they were authored for. We fall prey to religious fundamentalism when we’re insensitive to this gap.
A given work of literature can be interpreted in an infinite number of ways. This is especially true for sacred texts. Fruitfully interpreting a text often relies on the assistance of a particular culture or community that can offer commentary on the text. But all of these texts are ancient! Each one seems to have a plethora of wildly divergent communities and ways of relating. So which interpretation is the right one??? This is further exacerbated by certain traditions placing a premium and making strong claims of “authenticity”, despite substantial evidence to the contrary. For example, I suspect that many Western Buddhists would be surprised that monasteries in the past have routinely held standing armies, gone to war, and have had their practice be altered due to political expediency.
Many of these texts emerged and were transmitted in an oral tradition. The creation and editing of a work of art is closely tied to, and makes assumptions of the medium for which it is constructed. The invention of the printing press shatters these assumptions. Suddenly, we had people reading books by themselves, rather than reciting/reading them out loud in a participatory fashion in a group setting. Or having teachers transmit these teachings to individual students in a participatory dialog. The idea of a casual reader working their way through Plato’s Dialogues in a paperback book would likely have been inconceivable to the author. For example, I’d genuinely invite the reader to enact the dialogs in a group of people, and notice the difference when reading it to yourself.
Related to the printing press, the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions totally changed our relationship to reality. The change is so ingrained in us, that we don’t even notice it’s there, much like our literacy. We’re not born literate. But good luck trying to relate to your reality without language or words. Western culture and eventually global culture due to globalisation, has increasingly privileged the knowledge of statements of beliefs over other forms of knowledge. Due to Descartes, we prioritise relating to reality via categories of subjective/objective. That framing allowed us to develop technology that has substantially improved our material wellbeing. That’s no small thing! It’s difficult to imagine how materially stark life a few hundred years ago was. But this subjective/objective paradigm crowds out other forms of relating that are invaluable for personal transformation. The authors of these sacred texts would not have related to the world in this modern way.
Similarly, the West’s historical relationship to reality seems to have been ontological, versus the East’s relationship seems to have been epistemic. For example, I was listening to a Western Tibetan Buddhist translator talk about the differences in perspectives when he first started studying with his teacher. Tibet is an interesting case study because pre-exile, it was quite culturally isolated from the world. His teacher had experienced no contact with the outside world until the exile, and had only heard rumours about WW2. Anyway, this Western student was curious to know if the bodhisattva from his yidam practice truly existed. And what proof there was that it really existed. The Tibetan teacher was quite confused with this. From his perspective, he’d seen the bodhisattva in his dreams, and was able to relate to it in his meditations via his direct experience. He wasn’t concerned with the ontological status of what sort of thing the bodhisattva was. Epistemically, he was able to relate to it in his direct experience, and that was sufficient for him. The point is that different cultures can have wildly different orientations to reality itself. Ignorance of this can cause a lot of confusion.
When we discuss these different ways of relating, one isn’t necessarily “better” than the other. They’re each merely models of reality that make certain trade-offs for cultivating insight. It does seem to be the case that the West has lost something important along the way. But for our purposes, it’s worth keeping in mind that the ancients likely didn’t relate the way we currently do. That informs how we engage with ancient sacred texts.
On the topic of cultural gaps, a lot of meaning gets lost in translation. Each language offers a unique way of interpreting reality, and can bake in assumptions about the nature of reality itself. Certain pairs of languages can often have irreconcilable differences, where ideas from one language simply can’t be expressed in another language. There’s no such thing as an “authentic” translation. Each translation is a totally new work of art. At best, a translator can hope that this new work evokes in the reader the same thing that the original work evokes in the translator. But this also makes assumptions on the spiritual attainments of the translator. A translator can’t translate something that they themselves haven’t realised. A translator could rely on interpretation passed down by their teacher’s lineage. However, as discussed above, this is not immune to drift.
You can either engage with a teaching prescriptively or descriptively. That is, is the author giving you specific instructions to follow, or are they pointing at a description of a direct experience that they’ve had? I’ve found that most teachings are descriptive in nature. Especially Eastern teachings. But I’ve had the unfortunate tendency of reading them prescriptively. For example, consider 5:20 from the Gita - “They are not elated by good fortune nor depressed by the bad. With mind established in Brahman, they are free from delusion”. Read prescriptively, one might assume that this is telling us to negate or repress one’s feelings to grow enlightened. However, a descriptive reading would suggest that an enlightened person experiences a basic okayness where they are not swept away by good fortune, nor bad. That subtle shift in interpretation can cause very profound changes in how one practices.
Finally, many truths pointed to by these texts are ineffable. I can corroborate that certain deep states of meditation can’t be articulated using words. When they can, anything other than a poetic or figurative description remains elusive.
I’ve found it extraordinarily helpful to cultivate some measure of self-reliance on my path. A balance needs to be struck between being receptive to feedback, and listening to the intuition within one’s body/mind. It’s often been quite helpful to consistently compare and contrast different wisdom traditions to find areas of convergence.
The process
At this point, I’ve landed on a number of different practices for reading sacred texts. This specific process below places an emphasis on embodied transformation.
Engaging with these texts has been one of the most meaningful and rewarding things that I’ve done. Due to the many difficulties I’ve described above, please do not interpret this process as the only way to interpret these texts. If you do follow this process, please do so with a critical eye, at your own risk, and please let me know if you have feedback! Allow your own direct experience to be your guide.
Dear reader, please beware of anyone (especially a teacher) that insists that their way is the only way. Especially if they rarely say “I don’t know”.
Anyway, this is the process:
Before I start reading, I set my intention that I’d like to relate to the text non-propositionally. That is, I’m not here to argue with any specific statements or propositions with the text. I make myself receptive to letting the text be a doorway towards an internal shift. And it’s okay if one doesn’t materialise during that reading.
Read the text out loud, line by line. Slowly and with all of my awareness on the text.
As you read out loud, do so carefully. Rest in awareness of your body. Perhaps linger on lines or verses that seem to evoke something in you, or cause a shift. Don’t attempt to intellectualise what you’re sensing. Gently become aware of it, without grasping it, and continue reading the text.
Attempt to participate with the text as much as you can. Allow yourself the opportunity to occasionally close your eyes, and become really imaginative. For example, try to inhabit the author’s mind. Do some role-play. What would it be like to engage in your life from the author’s eyes?
Once reading is finished, spontaneously craft a poem, paragraph or some creative artefact in response. Don’t attempt to plan, intellectualise, edit or worry about the details at this stage. Ideally, this in your personal journal that you use with no expectation of editing. If there was any emotional shift in your awareness, attempt to spontaneously generate a response from that imaginal place.
At the end, simply rest in awareness of what is going on with you. Don’t attempt to change, shape or control it. Just notice if anything has shifted in your awareness.
What is the mechanism underlying this practice?
I don’t have a rigorous cognitive scientific explanation for you.
I suspect that such a practice has helped me grow the capacity to change the perspectives I have in the world, and the way that I participate in it. These are deep forms of knowledge. Using a sacred text has allowed me to engage in this transformation along a developmental orientation.
Like yoga, meditation and basketball, reading and relating to texts in this way is a practice. It won’t happen right away. Sometimes these texts can be quite long to read. For example, it might take a few hours to read the whole Gita. From a pragmatic perspective, it can also work to do a few chapters or verses at a time. Or you can choose some poems or prayers from your wisdom tradition. That’s what I did for a while.