Making Room for Miracles, Part 2

The Book of Miracles
by Kenneth L. Woodward

(Page 2 of 2)

Nature as a closed system of laws has never been an Indian view, either. Indian religions take it for granted that gods or other unseen beings can and do affect the world as it is ordinarily experienced. In the Indian scheme of things, the invisible world is at least as real as the visible. Moreover, Indian spirituality and philosophy both move in directions in which, for Buddhists especially, the physical world approaches the status of nonexistence. In some traditional forms of Buddhist and Hindu philosophy and practice, full spiritual realization requires the literal denaturing of ordinary human existence. For Buddhists, especially, all that is is impermanent and, to that extent, unreal relative to what is permanent. If there is a natural law in Indian religion, it is karma, the law by which what our mind holds on to — what we have thought and loved — determines our next rebirth. To gain liberation from all attachments, therefore, is to realize our true nature.

If, however, we begin with stories (as all religions do), we find that miracles tend to define themselves. That is, a miracle is usually an act or event that in some way repeats or echoes previous miracles within the same tradition. The Buddha's disciples repeat the miracles of the master as they progress along the path to enlightenment. Muslim mystics imitate the mystical path traced by the Prophet Muhammad. Krishna's miracles not only echo previous stories of the gods but also establish in his devotees the ability to replicate the experience of Krishna by, in some cases, becoming Krishna himself. When the Hebrew prophet Elisha picks up the mantle of his predecessor, Elijah, the power to work miracles passes with it. The apostles of Jesus, as we have already seen, perform miracles like Jesus, but they do so in his name and through the power of the same Holy Spirit.

In short, what constitutes a miracle within each religious tradition is defined to a great extent by the tradition itself. That is why I have followed each chapter on the foundational miracles in each tradition by a chapter on the miracles of the great saints, sages, and spiritual masters. In this way, we can see how miracles themselves become signs of the continuing power and presence of God in this world (for Jews, Christians, and Muslims), of the continuing power of the diverse gods and goddesses (in Hinduism), and of the continuing power of the Dharma, or teachings, of the Buddha — and in some Buddhist traditions, of the enduring presence of the Buddha himself.

The miracles of the saints also help us see something else. There is within each religion a history of the miraculous. As Buddhism develops into different schools or sects, miracles take a different form or prominence. In the religions of what we call Hinduism the miracles of Shiva's followers are different from those of Krishna's devotees. In the course of the Hebrew Bible, miracles move from those worked by God directly to those worked by his prophets to the disappearance of miracles altogether. In the course of the Middle Ages, Christian miracles shift (though not completely) from those worked by living saints to those worked through their relics after death. In some cases, the scriptures themselves have the power to transform those who study them: the Torah, for example, in Rabbinic Judaism, the Qur'an in Islam, and the Lotus Sutra in Buddhism.

Although miracles are found in all five major world religions, miracles are never to be sought or performed for their own sakes. The Buddha, in particular, is quite explicit on this point. He knows well that with spiritual discipline (asceticism and meditation) a monk can eventually fly in the air, make his body invisible to others, and otherwise manifest the miraculous powers (called siddhi) that accompany advancement toward liberation from the cycle of rebirth. But he forbids his monks from exhibiting these powers before the laity. To do so is a manifestation of vanity and therefore a sign of retrogression in the struggle to achieve liberation from attachments to a spurious self.

The Hebrew Bible is equally wary of miracles. Because miracles always manifest power, and because that power can come from evil as well as divine sources, miracles alone are never to be trusted. The book of Deuteronomy warns that miracles mean nothing if the miracle worker's intent is to lead the people away from observance of the Torah. Obedience to God and His commandments is more important than signs and wonders. In the New Testament, the miracles of Jesus are almost always performed in response to manifestations of faith in him, or designed to elicit that faith. Because faith is more important than miracles, Jesus tells his disciples, "Blessed are they who have not seen [the miracles his disciples have witnessed] yet believe." In the Qur'an, the Prophet Muhammad rejects every request to work miracles, saying that the Qur'an is itself a miracle and the only one Muslims need. It is only in the ahadith, or oral traditions of the Prophet's life, that we find the miracle stories of Muhammad.

In all the sacred scriptures of the five major world religions there are also contest stories, in which miracle workers from one religion compete with counterparts from another. Moses and his brother Aaron compete with the magicians employed by the pharaoh of Egypt. The Buddha competes with wonder-workers representing the Brahmin tradition that he has rejected. In the stories of the Indian saints, Hindu wonder-workers best those who are Buddhist, just as in Buddhist lore the Hindus are defeated. Here we see the miracle story put to polemical use — proof of the axiom that "in polemical writing, your magic is my miracle, and vice versa." The distinction between miracle and magic, as we will see, is crucial in the religions of the Bible — although even there the line between the two is often blurred in certain stories. In Biblical perspective, magic is seen as the manipulation of nature — which is God's creation — and therefore counterfeit, while a miracle is a sign of divine authority and power, and therefore legitimate. And the arch counterfeiter of them all, of course, is Satan. Thus, those who oppose Jesus accuse him of working miracles by Satan's power. Conversely, the miracles of Jesus and, later, his apostles and saints are read in part as signs of the victory of the Kingdom of God over Satan as the "prince of this world."

In the religions of India, history itself is the story of repeated conflicts between good and evil. Periodically the gods take human form to rescue the world from chaos — the ultimate form of evil. The miracles they work are signs of both their divine identity and their claim to exclusive worship. But in the saints of India, the power to work miracles is also understood to be innate in everyone, like bottled divinity that the saint learns to decant through rigorous spiritual discipline. In the miracles of the Buddha, especially, the gods themselves discover their limits as still-unliberated beings. But even the Buddha must endure the onslaughts of Mara, who resembles Satan in that he is the prince of the illusions (and attachments) that bedevil the unenlightened. In short, if we begin to think of morality not as a tissue of ethical principles as Jefferson did, but as a contest between the powers of good and evil in ourselves (which modern readers may readily understand) and in the world (which many may not), we can begin to see how some miracles, at least, find their meaning and moral resonance.

Miracle stories, it should be clear by now, are not case histories. By their very nature they resist the commonsense rules of cause and effect assumed since the eighteenth century, when the writing of history as we now understand that term began. We now know that the writing of history has taken many forms, and throughout I have relied on the work of contemporary scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of ancient and medieval texts.

Rather than ask, did it really happen?, The Book of Miracles invites a different question: what does it mean? The first question requires the kinds of materials — letters, diaries, and other contemporaneous records — that are absent in the literature of miracles. Most of the stories here come to us through oral traditions written down many centuries later. Moses is a figure (scholars believe) of the thirteenth century B.C.E. The Buddha lived five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, and the stories of Krishna were developed over a millennium before they achieved the forms in which they appear in this book. In every case, we are dealing with the literature of sacred biography, a genre in which the central figure cannot be separated from what others thought him or her to be. In the case of the Buddha, his teachings preceded the first biography known to us by half a millennium. By comparison, the gospels were all written within a few decades of the death of Jesus. Yet the effort to separate the "historical Jesus" from the New Testament accounts have, after 150 years of scholarly effort, yielded more sensational headlines than solid history. In short, the figures presented here are all historical, but they elude the usual conventions of modern historiography.

Moreover, the forms that sacred biography takes include myths and legends, which must be reckoned with on their own terms. Myths create worlds and give meaning to time and all that takes place within it. They "do not, strictly speaking, have meanings; they provide contexts in which meaning occurs." The lives of the saints, too, are indistinguishable from the literary and other conventions of those sacred biographers who wrote them. These hagiographers had purposes in mind other than those of modern biographers. But with those purposes in their minds, contemporary scholars are able to say much more about the saints, especially the Christian variety, than their Enlightenment predecessors dared conceive. In some cases, what we have is obviously legend. But even legend has its historical uses: as one of the best scholars of Christian hagiography once put it, "legend is the homage that the Christian community pays to its patron saints."

But when the question put to miracles is, what does it mean?, even the most familiar and apparently straightforward stories may suddenly become new and strange. It is the nature of scriptures that they continue to provide meaning for those who hold them sacred. What I have tried to capture in each case is the meaning of the miracle story in relation to its own tradition. In this way, each story provides an entry into a narrative world that is not the reader's own.

Obviously, a library of books would be needed to record and analyze all the miracles of the five major world religions. For this single volume I have had to make choices. In making those choices, I have tried to adhere to certain rules, and departed from them only when I felt the needs of readers required that I do so.

First, I have selected stories that are both interesting and considered classic, or foundational, within each tradition. However, I have not hesitated to include miracle stories from the margins in order to make a larger point. Selecting miracle stories from the Hindus was especially difficult since Hinduism is not one religion but a family of religions. Selecting miracles of the Christian saints was also difficult because, like Indian religion, Christianity has produced so many saints.

Second, I have tried to present these stories from the perspective of each tradition. Where there are differences of viewpoint within a tradition — as there usually are — I have attempted, space allowing, to indicate those differences. In the main, however, I have assumed that many contemporary believers do not know completely what is in their own tradition, much less religions not their own. I have kept the general reader in mind and provided endnotes for those who want more detailed information.

Third, only miracles attributed to human beings are included. Thus I have excluded stories in which God or the gods act directly. But I have included the miracles of the Hindu gods when they take human form as avatars since they are presumed by most traditional Hindus to have been historical personages. However, since most Western readers are unfamiliar with Indian religion, I have included creation myths by way of background.

Fourth, I have tried to limit my selection to stories that in principle were witnessed by others. Therefore, I have excluded the Resurrection of Jesus, which no one witnessed, and which is in any case not a miracle that Jesus himself worked. I have, however, included the Buddha's experience of enlightenment under the bodhi tree, which no one witnessed, because I cannot presume most readers are familiar with this story that is so essential to the understanding of Buddhism. An enlightened Buddhist, after all, can become a Buddha, but even the holiest Christian cannot become Christ.

Looking back, I can see that my own process of selection has produced a working definition of miracles. For those who like definitions, here it is:

A miracle is an unusual or extraordinary event that is in principle perceivable by others, that finds no reasonable explanation in ordinary human abilities or in other known forces that operate in the world of time and space, and that is the result of a special act of God or the gods or of human beings transformed by efforts of their own through asceticism and meditation.

That covers the field. But it does not begin to explain how, to the imaginatively adventurous, miracle stories can change the way we see the world.

Copyright © 2000 by Kenneth L. Woodward

About the Author

Kenneth L. Woodward has been Religion Editor at Newsweek for thirty-six years. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Smithsonian, Commonweal, The Nation, and America, among other publications. He is also the winner of a National Magazine Award and the author of Making Saints.