Different nations seek God in different ways, but some of these ways are remarkably similar, using numbers and letters and imbuing them both with a supernatural, Divine significance.
I can liken the Pythagorean preoccupation with numbers, as a path to God and into the mystery of Nature, to a similar preoccupation of the Chinese thinkers and mystics with the secrets of the hieroglyph. There are ten thousand Chinese hieroglyphs in existence (according to my family’s erstwhile Chinese friend, Professor Chi-Yao Li, or Li Chi-Yao, as the Westerners were calling him), and an overwhelming majority of these are completely unknown not only to the foreigners, but to more than ninety-nine per cent of the Chinese people themselves. Only specially-trained Chinese sages and scholars, predominantly in monasteries still scattered around China (Mao’s Cultural Revolution notwithstanding!), have access to this secret ancient wisdom, and the best of them devote their whole lives to their study, which, they believe, brings them closer to God and His infinite wisdom. (This fact was corroborated by Soviet Ambassador to China Pavel Fedorovich Yudin, a prominent Soviet philosopher and a scholar in Chinese studies.)
It is clear to me that a very close similarity of these two pursuits does exist, and one can surmise that in their pursuit of numbers the Pythagoreans exhibited a more scientifically-minded approach, whereas the Chinese scholars have emphasized a more aesthetically-minded approach. But surely, the numbers too have a certain aesthetic value to the scientific mind, while the hieroglyphs may well possess a scientific quality, which eludes even the most diligent Westerner.
To go further still along the road of these comparisons, the Jewish scholars who have been studying Hebrew characters of the Torah for ages seeking certain secret meanings through mystical associations of letters and their corresponding numbers, known as “gematria,” (arguably derived from… geometry!) carry an uncanny resemblance to both the Pythagoreans and the sages of China, all three of them as a group deserving special attention, which subject I am certainly going to elaborate on, in the not too distant future through the unique prism of Russian mysticism and its special propensity for esoteric God-seeking.
I can liken the Pythagorean preoccupation with numbers, as a path to God and into the mystery of Nature, to a similar preoccupation of the Chinese thinkers and mystics with the secrets of the hieroglyph. There are ten thousand Chinese hieroglyphs in existence (according to my family’s erstwhile Chinese friend, Professor Chi-Yao Li, or Li Chi-Yao, as the Westerners were calling him), and an overwhelming majority of these are completely unknown not only to the foreigners, but to more than ninety-nine per cent of the Chinese people themselves. Only specially-trained Chinese sages and scholars, predominantly in monasteries still scattered around China (Mao’s Cultural Revolution notwithstanding!), have access to this secret ancient wisdom, and the best of them devote their whole lives to their study, which, they believe, brings them closer to God and His infinite wisdom. (This fact was corroborated by Soviet Ambassador to China Pavel Fedorovich Yudin, a prominent Soviet philosopher and a scholar in Chinese studies.)
It is clear to me that a very close similarity of these two pursuits does exist, and one can surmise that in their pursuit of numbers the Pythagoreans exhibited a more scientifically-minded approach, whereas the Chinese scholars have emphasized a more aesthetically-minded approach. But surely, the numbers too have a certain aesthetic value to the scientific mind, while the hieroglyphs may well possess a scientific quality, which eludes even the most diligent Westerner.
To go further still along the road of these comparisons, the Jewish scholars who have been studying Hebrew characters of the Torah for ages seeking certain secret meanings through mystical associations of letters and their corresponding numbers, known as “gematria,” (arguably derived from… geometry!) carry an uncanny resemblance to both the Pythagoreans and the sages of China, all three of them as a group deserving special attention, which subject I am certainly going to elaborate on, in the not too distant future through the unique prism of Russian mysticism and its special propensity for esoteric God-seeking.
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