at the heart, as preferred by Aristotle.^80 He elaborates on the nature of the
heart more fully in theRevival of the Religious Sciences(Ihya Ulum al-Din):
Know that the locus of knowledge (mahall al-‘ilm) is the heart...It relates to the
realities of knowable concepts as a mirror does to the forms of colored objects. Just
as every colored object has a form whose image is impressed upon and appears in
the mirror, so every knowable concept has a reality whose form is impressed upon
and becomes manifest in the mirror of the heart. Just as in the former case there are
three distinct aspects–the mirror, the forms of individual objects, and the
appearances of their images in the mirror–so in the latter case there are three
[distinct] aspects as well: the heart, the realities of things, and the fact of these
realities’appearance and presence in the heart. Thus the term‘knower’refers to the
heart wherein the image of the realities of things is located, the term‘knowable’
denotes these realities, and the term‘knowledge,’the appearance of their image(s)
in the mirror [of the heart].^81
These ideas reverberate not only with the Platonic segregation of appear-
ance and the Real, but also with precepts of thefifth-century Ghandaran
Buddhist thinker Vasubandhu, whose tripartite system of soul, mind, and
body resembles that described by Plotinus. For him, all things“are just like
the images in a mirror which are devoid of any objectivity that one can get
hold of,”which also resembles Plotinus’statement that“[Particulars are]
nothing but phantoms in a phantom, like something in a mirror...like
things in a dream or water or a mirror.”^82
Al-Ghazali expresses similar ideas in his Persian-languageAlchemy of
Happiness(Kimya-i Sa’adet) of 1105:
Thefirst step to self-knowledge is to know that thou art composed of an outward
shape, called the body, and an inward entity called the heart, or soul. By‘heart’Ido
not mean the piece offlesh situated in the left of our bodies, but that which uses all
the other faculties as its instruments and servants. In truth it does not belong to the
visible world but to the invisible, and has come into this world as a traveler visits a
foreign country for the sake of merchandise, and will presently return to its native
land. It is the knowledge of this entity and its attributes which is the key to the
knowledge of God.^83
The confluence of Greek and Buddhist texts in Alexandria renders their
transmission to the Islamic world through Sasanian houses of wisdom
quite probable, enabling al-Ghazali to articulate the cosmopolitan accre-
tion of knowledge that comprised Islam in its process of becoming.(^80) Black, 2005 : 313. (^81) Treiger, 2012 : 32. (^82) McEvilley, 1980 : 185 (111.6.7).
(^83) al-Ghazali, 1993 : 18.
128 Seeing with the Heart