a note on the three orientations 451transcendence and immanence, expressed in the Christian mystery
of the Trinity, represents a turning point in the spiritual experience of
humanity. Th is dialectic took divergent forms in Buddhism and Con-
fucianism. Everywhere, however, it was marked in the fi rst instance not
by the development of systematic and discursive abstractions (almost
always spurned by the found ers of these religions) but by an attempt to
come to terms with our condition of mortality, groundlessness, insatia-
bility, and susceptibility to belittlement.
When nineteenth- century comparative students of religion like Vic-
tor von Strauss and Ernst von Lasaulx, following the lead of their
eighteenth- century pre de ces sors, marveled at the parallels among the
teachings of religious visionaries in diff erent ancient civilizations (be-
fore the rise of an academic culture chiefl y concerned to show that ev-
erything is diff erent from everything else), they gave voice to the same
belief in a momentous, overlapping series of changes in our understand-
ing of ourselves. Th is belief is the legitimate element in the conception of
the Axial Age. Th e development of this insight, however, requires a sub-
stance and a scope, as well as a spirit, at odds with those that have done
much to shape work written under the Axial Age banner.
- Th e Axial Age and the three orientations: emphasis and content. Th e
content of the common ground of the three orientations explored early
in this book diff ers signifi cantly from the content attributed by the pro-
ponents of the Axial Age thesis to the innovations that they highlight.
Th ere is, of course, no single vision of the substance of these spiritual
inventions in the writings about the Axial Age. Nevertheless, with vary-
ing degrees of emphasis, the focus in much of this literature falls on four
sets of changes and on the relations among them. Th e fi rst theme is the
turn to transcendence: the distinction between a mundane and extra-
mundane order of reality, a distinction thought to be radicalized both by
the intransigent mono the ism of the ancient Jews and by some of the
philosophizing of the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Chinese. Th e second
theme is a series of related forms of disembedding: of the individual from
his ascriptive social relations (those set by birth rather than by choice), of
society from nature, and of nature itself from the higher order of reality.
Th e third theme is the development of a complex of forms of conscious-
ness focused on the power of thought to address and revise its own