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ivine lay, acred
D P S
aughter, and piritual
L S
nderstanding
U
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ivine lay, acred
D P S
aughter, and piritual
L S
nderstanding
U
Patrick Laude
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DIVINEPLAY,SACREDLAUGHTER,ANDSPIRITUALUNDERSTANDING
© Patrick Laude,2005.
All rights reserved.No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2005 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™
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Houndmills,Basingstoke,Hampshire,England RG21 6XS
Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
Macmillan division of St.Martin’s Press,LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.
Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States,United Kingdom
and other countries.Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European
Union and other countries.
ISBN 1–4039–7015–7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Laude,Patrick,1958–
Divine play,sacred laughter,and spiritual understanding / by
Patrick Laude.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
ISBN 1–4039–7015–7
1.Laughter––Religious aspects.2.Wit and humor—Religious
aspects.3.Religion—Humor.I.Title.
BL65.L3L38 2005
202(cid:2).1—dc22 2005043189
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd.,Chennai,India.
First edition:October 2005
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
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able of ontents
T C
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
1. Mâyâand the Divine Treasure 9
2. Ambiguity of the Demiurge 17
3. Dionysus, Shiva, Osiris 41
4. Divine Troublemakers 61
5. Coyote and Kin 77
6. Reading the Trickster’s Footsteps 95
7. Thundering Clowns 101
8. Spiritual Laughter 119
9. Fools for Christ’s Sake 131
10. The People of Blame 177
11. Fools on a Tightrope 195
12. Epilogue: Cracks of Light 227
Notes 229
Bibliography 263
Index 271
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cknowledgments
A
I
want to thank the Faculty of Languages and Linguistics at
Georgetown University for providing me with a 2003 Research
Summer Grant that allowed me to complete this manuscript. Thank
you to Alireza Nurbakhsh for allowing me to reproduce a revised ver-
sion of the article “MalâmiyyahPsycho-Spiritual Therapy” (Sufi, 54,
summer 2002) as chapter 10 of this book. My deepest thanks to
Christian Fitzpatrick for his liminal and catalytic insights, to Jason
Steffen for his attentive and thorough assistance in establishing an
extensive bibliography, to Clinton Minaar for his close editing of the
manuscript, to André Gomez and Jean-Pierre Lafouge for their care-
ful reading and precious suggestions, to Amira El-Zein and Jacquelyn
Bralove for their perceptive enthusiasm in favor of this project, and to
my wife Aun Ling for her loving support.
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ntroduction
I
T
he chapters that follow delve into a wide range of topics that may,
at first sight, puzzle a prospective reader in search of a unity of pur-
pose and an architectonic coherence. Nevertheless, the underlying
principles and the general focus of this collection of studies will not
escape, upon careful review, a reader’s attention. The underlying con-
cern of this book is the question of the relationship between the
Absolute and the relative, the Necessary and the contingent, God and
the created worlds. This question is both fundamentally simple and
indefinitely complex depending upon the vantage point one adopts in
order to approach it. This question is simple inasmuch as it may always
be reduced to schematic metaphysical syntheses that can provide read-
ers endowed with some intellectual intuition with all that they may
need to penetrate the conceptual avenues that lead to transformative
knowledge. A metaphysical idiom, whether it be highly conceptual
like the Advaita Vedânta or simply allusive, symbolic, and nonsystem-
atic like Chuang Tzu’s, requires that it not be taken as a literal exhaus-
tion of reality by means of representations. In fact, even its most
sophisticated conceptual “constellations” are nothing but symbolic
lights that only suggest the infinite vastness of the dark vault of the
essential Night. In an ultimate sense, there is nothing more simple
than the Absolute, since—as Henry Corbin reminds us1—the latter is
ab-solutum, free in the most radical and integral sense. This supreme
freedom from everything cannot but involve simplicity since it
includes in its very definition a perfect independence, and since such
an independence is incompatible with any kind of compositeness, the
latter necessarily entailing the intrinsic constraint that would result
from the relationship between its parts. Therefore, the Absolute could
be defined as That which is perfectly free, unbound, and simple. In
sharp contrast to this perfect simplicity, all that we may experience in
our life and in the universe that is most familiar to us, is inextricably
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2 Sacred Laughter and Spiritual Understanding
marked with compositeness. This compositeness is concomitant with
the contingency and relativity of all that we can experience in this
realm. In the current context, we understand contingency as the state
of a being deprived of intrinsic necessity, and relativity—apart from its
strictly technical reference of being exclusively relative to the human
mind—as the state of being that is dependent upon something else for
its existence, and also of being intrinsically involved in a relation with
something other than itself.
The relationship between the Absolute and the relative is in itself
a question, since it appears prima facie, contradictory. How can the
Absolute, which is unbound, be seemingly bound by a relationship
with something else? The very definition of the Absolute precludes
Its being relative to, and a fortiori contingent upon, another reality.
It follows that the Absolute as such does not, and cannot, enter into
any “relation” with anything “other” than Itself. In fact, to posit any
“other” besides the Absolute would be, ipso facto, self-contradictory
since it would amount to limiting the field of the Absolute, thereby leav-
ing something out of It, something that could not but be, therefore,
“related” to It in one way or another. In other words, if the Absolute
is to be what It is, then nothing else can bein a full sense. And this is,
by the same token, the reason for Its being Infinite, since it can lack
nothing that would remain “outside” of Itself, as it were. Any consistent
doctrine of the Absolute is therefore by definition “unitarian,” or better
“non-dualistic”: it excludes the very possibility of otherness while
including any apparent otherness into the one and only Reality.
On the other hand, there is no doubting that relative beings do
exist. We know it to be for being one of them, and for not doubting
our existence for a single moment, whatever we may understand by
“existence.” So, the coincidence of the Absolute and the relative is
already, as suggested above, a paradoxical possibility, or a paradoxical
impossibility. How can the Absolute and the relative meet? And if they
do, can the Absolute still be considered the Absolute? And how can
the relative be “related” to what is, by definition, “unrelated” in a uni-
versal sense? This is the mystery par excellence, a mystery that we live
every day, most often without even being conscious of it.2 The two
terms of this “necessary” and “impossible” relationship are both
intrinsically close and infinitely distant. In a sense, all the diverse mat-
ters that we propose to discuss in this book provide allusive, enig-
matic, and paradoxical answers to this coincidence of opposites. The
phenomena that we study in the following pages are all situated at the
critical intersection of two incommensurably disproportionate realms,
the Absolute and the relative, whence emerge the unsettling, ambiguous,
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Introduction 3
unbalanced, and puzzling aspects of reality that they oblige us to
consider and confront, albeit reluctantly.
In a most general sense, the realm of the relative is an expression,
or a manifestation, of the Absolute. In this respect, the relative reflects
the perfections of the Absolute, and provides us, therefore, with a
measure of order and balance that stems from these perfections. This,
in a very concrete and immediate sense, is why we can and must go
about being who we are and doing what we do in this world, while
knowing that this world is not “the whole story,” and certainly not the
end of it. In another sense though, the Absolute manifests Itself, as a
flash so to speak, in particular realities and phenomena that bear a
more direct imprint of Its reality than the overall realm that proceeds
from it. This is the privileged and sacred domain of symbols, theo-
phanies, saints, prophets, and revelations. Now, these more direct
manifestations of the Absolute, which are like vertical and powerful
influxes of light, bring with them both a message of transcendence
and a message of immanence, in a dual complementarity that, in a
sense, replicates the two dimensions of distance and closeness within
their theophanic array of influence. There is, first, a definite sense in
which the Absolute cannot be manifested in the relative without
cracking the shell of the latter. When these two incommensurable
realities meet, there cannot but be “trouble in the kingdom,” even
though this trouble is ultimately the means of transcending the plane
upon which the trouble appears to be real, and, therefore, the violent
way of establishing a new and higher balance and peace on the ashes
of a previous and precarious equilibrium. From this standpoint, the
irruption of the Absolute within the relative is lightning-like, like
the Lakota clown heyoka, as it shatters and destroys the fabric of this
world, like Dionysus’ maenads rip apart their garments in the ecstasy
of their amorous rapture for the god, or like Shiva annihilating the
present world in order to give rise to a new one. Considered from
this vantage point the relative has ultimately no reality, and only the
Absoluteis.
From another standpoint, the relative also “includes” seeds of
absoluteness, if one may say so, and these seeds may be grown into
ladders leading up to heaven. This is the point of view of the world as
a “natural” theophany. However, even these spiritual seeds, these
metaphysical messages, involve a sacred element of “foreignness,”
“oddity,” or “madness” when considered from the standpoint of ordi-
nary consciousness, either in themselves, like the terrible and awe-
some aspect of nature and beauty, or as a kind of shadow, which is like
the harsh ransom of transcendence within immanence. There is no
