Truth & Rationality:

Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do everything written in it. Then you will be prosperous and successful. -Joshua 1:8

By AD 823, Chinese monasteries had so many books that they invented rotating bookcases. Yet, why didn’t printing reform China?

In the 12th century (when Christian monasteries in Oxford and Cambridge were evolving into universities), a Buddhist monk, Yeh Mengte (d. 1148), visited many temples and monasteries in China. He reported that 'in six or seven out of ten temples, one can hear the wheels of the revolving cases turning' day and night. But were the monks turning the bookcases in order to find and read books?

Historian Lynn White Jr. explains that the sound of the rotating bookcases was “not a result of scholarly activity” (1. Lynn White Jr., Medieval Religion and Technology - Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978, 47). The monks used their sound as a mantra. They sought not wisdom but 'salvation by the rotation of sacred writings.' Meditating on a sound without meaning helped empty the mind of all thoughts.

Why didn’t the ancient civilizations of India, China and Africa develop technology and economy? They did not because our sages taught that salvation comes from ‘deliverance from intellect’, not from sin. The Hindu/Buddhist idea of meditation was the opposite of the Bible’s, which required God’s children to meditate on God’s Word to fill their minds with Truth.

Medieval monks developed technology in Europe because Christian monasteries required novitiates to spend years studying. In order to understand and apply the Bible, they had to study language, grammar, literature, mathematics, music, philosophy, and practical arts such as agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, metallurgy, and technology.

Thus, the Christian monastery—an institution for cultivating ‘religious life’—began producing a peculiarly rational person. They believed that the human mind was different from the animal brain. It was made in God’s Image to know and love God, goodness, beauty and truth, so that God’s children could establish their dominion over the earth. That is why monks copied, illustrated, exegeted, wrote, and collected books in libraries. They developed accounting and management as they invented and used technology to become creative and productive. In order to multiply their talents, the monks formulated complex theories of capitalism, legal and political systems. The Bible became the ladder on which the West climbed the heights of its educational, technical, economic, political, legal and scientific excellence.

Challenge Question:

Why do you read the Bible? Is it just to complete a daily ritual? Or to know God's will, develop your mind, find truth and apply it to solve problems so that others can find abundant life?

Related Scriptures:

● All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. – 2 Timothy 3:16

● Blessed is the one… whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on His law, day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither— whatever they do prospers. - Psalm 1:1-3

● But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do. -James 1:25