Usage of sight across faiths

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Diana Eck’s book Darśan Seeing The Divine Image In India brings up many points about religion that I’ve thought about for many years but didn’t know how to put into words. Growing up in an Abrahamic faith in a western culture I found it hard to understand some parts of this book but there were also some key points that resonated with me. On page 45 Eck quotes a religious text stating how in order to believe in a god or deity you have to be able to see it and feel it. This idea of needed a physical form of the god or deity makes so much sense in my mind because it would provide a form of tangible proof of existence in some form or another. In many Indian homes there are shrines to their gods and deities that they often emotionally and physically interact with daily. 






In Abrahamic faiths (which ae often found in more western cultures) there isn’t a need or emphasis for a physical form of god that people can see or feel but rather an emphasis on the word of god, not the looks of god. I find it so interesting how different faiths incorporate the senses in different ways and find some senses to be more important than others. 

Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausApril 2, 2020 at 12:30 PM

    I think it's the tendency of the "Abrahamic faiths" (c'mon, I know you mean Judaism ;-)) to play down or even condemn the physical elements of interacting with the "Something More" of reality (i.e., what many religions call "gods" or "God") that has made them so irrelevant to many modern people. Disembodied relationships don't feel like anything, but we register and remember experiences we see with our eyes, touch with our hands, taste, smell, hear - and really feel connected. So we turn away from our own institutionalized religions that don't offer much of this. Sometimes it feels like other religions do it better than the "Abrahamic faiths" we've grown up with (and out of).You see this here in Hindu worship.

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