(Kitab al-Hidaya ila Fara'id al-Qulub)
The 11th Century Spanish Rabbi's primary work.
This is a summarised version of the complete work. The work in full was divided into 10 chapters, each representing a "gate," or a specific Sufi virtue that Ibn Paquda explicated, which would lead to the Sufi prayer ideal of divine union with God. Taken over from the Sufis, these "gates" presaged the 10 Sephirot of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life (Otz Chaim). Ibn Paquda based his representation of these 10 levels of closeness to God on the Sufi al Makki's (d. 996 CE) Qut al-Qulub, the first comprehensive manual of Sufism.
English, fully bookmarked, facsimile PDF eBook, 5 Megabytes, 59 pages
______________________________________
WISDOM OF THE EAST
THE DUTIES OF THE HEART
BY RABBI BACHYE
TRANSLATED, WITH INTRODUCTION
BY EDWIN COLLINS
HELLIER HEBREW SCHOLAR, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1905
______________________________________
CONTENTS
Editorial Note - p. 4
Introduction - p. 5
Wisdom, the highest good - p. 15
Seek no reward but wisdom's self - p. 16
The gates of knowledge - p. 17
The ethics of the body and the ethics of the soul - p. 17
Examples of the duties of the heart - p. 18
The duties of the heart are more important than any others - p. 19
The dual duty of the dual man - p. 20
All conduct is conditioned by the heart - p. 20
The duties of the heart are for every time and place - p. 21
Endless virtues spring from those of the heart - p. 22
The duty of using reason: And of taking no dogma on trust - p. 22
Faith without knowledge - p. 22
Belief in the existence of one creator as the basis of ethics - p. 23
The only true unity - p. 24
The examination of creation shows the goodness of the creator - p. 25
Free will and providence - p. 25
Gratitude to god and man - p. 26
Gratitude is due for good intentions - p. 26
The motives of human benevolence - p. 26
Man's obligation of gratitude to god - p. 28
The motive forces that impel man to grateful service - p. 29
The whole of human conduct belongs to the domain of ethics - p. 30
The danger of pride and self-righteousness - p. 32
The danger of pride - p. 32
Humility, true and false - p. 33
The signs and consequences of true humility - p. 34
Humility and egotism - p. 35
Aids to the cultivation of humility - p. 35
The charity of the meek - p. 36
Consistent humility and sincerity - p. 37
Where humility is sin - p. 37
The hall-marks of the meek - p. 37
The pride consistent with humility - p. 38
Humility as a worldly advantage - Contentment - p. 39
The proper study of mankind is man - p. 40
Of trust in god - p. 42
Keeping account with the soul - p. 44
Contemplation leading to communion with god - p. 46
The gate of love - p. 48
The right study of nature leads to nature's god - p. 49
What is repentance - p. 51
The motives to repentance - p. 54
On the possibility of repentance - p. 55
Habits of those that love god - p. 57
______________________________________
From the INTRODUCTION
BACHYE'S "Guide to the Duties of the Heart" is the unique work that first linked the ethical science of the West with the emotional and spiritual morality of the East. It combines, in an artistic unity, elements drawn from the philosophy and contemplative mysticism of the Arabs, from Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism, and from Greek thought. By exhibiting the spiritual foundations of universal Ethics, and of the moral law of the Bible, in the light of pure reason, Bachye prepared the way for finding that common ground on which, wholly or in part, all the moral religions, and all the non-religious systems of morality, are rooted. Therefore, although actually written in Spain, a land of the West, it forms a fitting opening volume for the "Wisdom of the East Series."
Only a small part of the original finds a place in the following pages; but I have in my translation— sometimes literal, now and again a summarised paraphrase—endeavoured to give a selection of passages connected by the author's central thought, and showing his line of argument and the aim and spirit of his work, instead of a mere collection of pithy sayings and isolated, beautiful, but disconnected reflections. This was the only way of doing justice to an author, some of whose reasonings are out of date, but the spirit of whose main contention is eternally valid; a teacher of virtue and duty, who did not attempt to inculcate this or that individual virtue, but aimed at the formation of character and conditions in which right conduct would be inevitable, so that details might well be left to take care of themselves.
If the modern world owes its delight in physical beauty, and much of its sense of the true in Nature and in Art, to Greece; its ideal of goodness, and practically all the spiritual elements in our thought and feeling, our conception of holiness, and every moral characteristic of civilisation and of culture, have come to us from the Orient. For the form and system of Ethics we may be indebted to the few Hellenic thinkers whose sublime intellects raised them above the phenomenal world into a clear atmosphere of ideas, always suffused with the light of truth and justice; but all the permanent and vital contents of Ethics came, living and pulsating, with their vitalising possibilities, both into that atmosphere and into our life of to-day, with the glow of dawn from the East. Indeed, the two cardinal ideas essential to all present and future moral systems—the sanctity of human life as such, and the, absolutely universal authority and validity of moral law and obligation—are entirely absent from even the writings of Plato, the greatest of the Greeks. These two are among the most definite colours that the prism of modern thought has enabled us to single out in our perception of the pure white light, from the sun of righteousness that shone on Sinai. They are specially characteristic of the Hebrew moral teaching which the three great religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islamism—have spread throughout the world.
In the world's organism, it seems to be the special function of the Oriental peoples to secrete, or to absorb from what is, or may be, beyond and above the physical universe, all that man needs to nourish the life of his soul and to perfect his individuality; while it is the function of the Western civilised nations to show the Eastern peoples how the material resources and the forces of nature may be mastered, and the observed relations which we call nature's laws may be applied to serve the purposes of material life, individual and communal. The Semitic religious, and the Aryan-Oriental mystic, intuitions, seem to be the chlorophyll that draws, from the sunlight of spiritual being, elements essential to the healthy growth of the human race; and if Western humanity is to be saved from becoming a dry and sapless log, it must perennially renew that foliage which brings it into contact with the ambient upper air, warmed by the glow of righteousness and love.
... Rabbi Bachye bar Joseph ibn Bakoda was a contemporary of the poet-philosopher Ibn Gebirol, and held, in the Jewish community, the position of Dayan—an office which combines something of the duties of a judge in civil, religious, and matrimonial causes, with those of a Rabbi authorised to answer questions on all matters of Jewish law and life, and on the application, to special and exceptional cases, of the general principles found in the Bible and Talmud.
Before the writing of his "Duties of the Heart," no systematic treatise on Ethics had appeared among the Jews. Hebrew literature, from the Bible onwards, is, of course, full of ethical and moral teaching, and the same must be said of the Talmud and the Midrashim, 'The Sentences of the Fathers," and of Rabbi Nathan; while "The Masecheth Derech Eretz," Ibn Gebirol's "The Choicest of the Pearls," and "The Son of Proverbs," by Samuel Hannagid, must be mentioned among the chief works with ethical contents. But no scientific working out of a system of ethics based on one central thought, and claiming universal validity, had even been thought of. Bachye also complained that although there was no lack of guidance as to the duties of the body and its members, by which he understood all the outward conduct of life—even honesty in dealing, deeds of charity and benevolence and even the activities of the tongue and lips in prayer and praise, and in good or evil speaking, in telling the truth and in lying—there was no book dealing with the Duties of the Heart and Mind.
It was to supply this want that he wrote, in Arabic, the book which was destined in its Hebrew Translation (by Jehudah ibn Tibbon) to become one of the most popular as well as the most authoritative expositions of spiritual Judaism.
... By the Duties of the Heart Bachye understands the whole of conduct, and of thought in its ideal essence. For he holds that the outward act is, morally, of no significance, except in so far as it represents a manifestation of character and an expression of intention.
The whole of conduct belongs to the domain of ethics. Every act, and every abstention from action, is either right or wrong. Even the amount one eats, the wearing of certain clothes, the use of language, the simplest movements of the body, are, all of them, parts of conduct to be distinguished as either right or wrong. But what makes them so is not the act itself, but the intention with which it is done or left undone. And, since our intentions are conditioned by our state of mind and feeling, the first and the final duty, the foundation of ethics, is the perfection of our own souls.
Thus Bachye is at one with Stephen in asserting that "the moral law has to be asserted in the form : not 'do this,' but 'be this.'"
The perfection of the human soul, however, from which all right conduct must result, and which every righteous act and every righteous thought tends to produce, is only attained by bringing it into complete unison with God, through such a perfect love of Him that His will is our will, and we have no desire that is out of harmony with His wisdom and His benevolence.
... It is interesting to note that, although Bachye is an orthodox Rabbi, his ethics is not a Jewish theological work, but sets forth a motive to right conduct, starting from universal reason, and appealing, not only to the Children of Israel, nor even to the wise and intelligent alone, but to all mankind. Human reason is the ultimate test of conduct, of revelation, and of faith. The duties of the heart are more important than those of the body, because they are of universal application, and not limited by time, or place, or circumstance.
EDWIN COLLINS.
Feb. I, 1904.
______________________________________
Peculiarities
The Duties of the Heart became one of the most important Jewish pietistic works produced in the last 1,000 years — and was among the first books ever printed in Hebrew (Naples, 1489). It was written in Judæo-Arabic (but in Hebrew characters) under the title Kitab al-Hidaya ila Fara'id al-Qulub ("Book of Direction to the Duties of the Heart", sometimes titled as "Guide to the Duties of the Heart").
The Duties of the Heart is divided into 10 chapters termed Sha'arim ("gates"), corresponding to the 10 fundamental principles which, according to Bachye's view, constitute man's spiritual life. This treatise on the inner spiritual life makes numerous references to both Biblical and Talmudic texts. It draws on the contemporary Muslim / Sufi influences present in his contemporary Medieval Spain and also to the Classics (translated by the school of Hunayn bin Ishaq).
______________________________________
Legacy
The first book of Eastern European Hasidism, Toledot Ya'akov Yosef by Rabbi Ya'akov Yosef of Polnoye, disciple of the Baal Shem Tov (1780 CE) twice includes the saying: "The wise man has said: You have returned from the minor war, now prepare yourselves for the major war". That is, prepare for spiritual struggle which is more important than any material struggle. This is a well-known hadith in Islam. It probably found its way into Hassidic tradition through its appearance in Rabbi Bachye's "Duties of the Heart". He included many Muslim / Sufi teachings and stories in his work, ascribing them to anonymous sages.
______________________________________
About other editions
Duties of the Heart was translated into Hebrew by Judah ibn Tibbon in the years 1161-80 under the title "Chovot HaLevavot" (sometimes called "Chovot HaLevavos"). There was another contemporary translation by Joseph Kimhi, but its complete text did not endure the time.
There are numerous complete English translations available.
______________________________________
QUOTES
p. 15: This Wisdom, or Philosophy, is of three kinds: the Philosophy of Nature, dealing with the properties and accidents of Matter ; the Philosophy of Number and Measurement, the Mathematical Wisdom, including Astronomy and Music ; and Philosophy, properly so called, including the knowledge of God, and the knowledge of His laws, and the rest of the sciences that are concerned with life and mind, and with human souls and spiritual beings. But all divisions of Wisdom are gates which the Creator, Blessed be He, has opened to human beings ...
p. 43: He who trusts in God is able to turn his attention from worldly anxieties and devote it to doing what is right. For, in the restfulness of his soul and the liberty of his mind, and in the diminution of his anxieties in regard to worldly affairs, he may be compared to an alchemist who knows how to turn silver into gold and brass and tin to silver. Only that he is better off; for he needs neither implements nor materials in his alchemy, and he needs not store up his gold in fear of robbers, nor restrict his production to what is only enough for the day and be in fear for the morrow. For he has confidence that God will supply his wants when and where it may be requisite.
p. 36: HE who is humble before God will not only do good to all men, but he will speak kindly to them and of them, and will never relate anything shameful about them, and will forgive them for any shameful things they may say about him, even if they are not worthy of such treatment. It is related of one of the Chassideem, that once when he was taking a walk with his disciples, they passed the carcass of a dog in an advanced stage of decomposition. His disciples exclaimed: "Oh, how this carcass stinks!" He replied : "Oh, how white its teeth are!" so as to counteract their remark.
Free eBooks with every order!
