Sha'ar HaHakdamot (The Gate of Introductions)

About Sha'ar HaHakdamot (The Gate of Introductions)

Sha'ar HaHakdamot, the Gate of Introductions, is the introductory volume of the Lurianic eight-gate compendium assembled by Shmuel Vital from the writings of his father Chaim Vital after Chaim's death in 1620. The book occupies a peculiar position in the architecture of the Lurianic corpus: it is sometimes counted as the first of the eight gates and sometimes treated as a separate prologue that stands before them. In either reading its function is the same — to prepare the student for the technical exposition that the other gates will undertake by establishing the basic vocabulary, the foundational distinctions, and the conceptual orientation that the Lurianic system presupposes. A reader who comes to Etz Chaim or Sha'ar HaKavanot without first working through Sha'ar HaHakdamot is likely to find the technical chapters opaque, since the later gates assume the framework that this opening volume is designed to install.

The history of Sha'ar HaHakdamot is inseparable from the history of the entire Lurianic redactional project. Chaim Vital, the Safed-born disciple (of Calabrian-descended family) of Isaac Luria who became the principal vehicle through which Luria's oral teaching was converted into written text, worked on the materials for decades after his master's death in 1572. Vital wrote multiple recensions of Lurianic doctrine across his lifetime, jealously guarding the manuscripts and refusing for the most part to allow them to be copied. He died in Damascus in 1620 without having published any of his Lurianic writings in print, and the task of organizing his manuscripts into a coherent corpus fell to his son Shmuel, who had himself been trained in Lurianic Kabbalah and who set out to assemble the surviving materials into a teachable curriculum. The result was the Shemonah Shearim, the Eight Gates, of which Sha'ar HaHakdamot is the introductory volume.

The textual situation is intricate. Yossi Avivi's three-volume Hebrew study Kabbalat Ha-Ari, published by the Ben-Zvi Institute in 2008, has shown that the materials Shmuel Vital drew on represented multiple stages of his father's evolving understanding, and that the Sha'ar HaHakdamot in particular incorporates introductory passages from several different periods of Chaim Vital's work. Some sections appear to be early — bearing the marks of Vital's Cordoverian training before Luria's arrival in Safed — while other sections reflect the mature Lurianic system in its developed form. The book is, in this sense, less a single composition than a layered anthology of introductory material that Shmuel Vital arranged into a teachable sequence.

Sha'ar HaHakdamot does several things at once. It establishes the basic distinctions between the Ein Sof and the sefirot, between essence and vessel, between the unknowable divine source and the manifestation of divinity through the structure of emanation. It introduces the vocabulary of partzufim, of the four worlds, of tzimtzum and shevirah and tikkun, providing the technical terms that the later gates will use without further explanation. It addresses the question of how Lurianic doctrine relates to the prior Kabbalistic tradition, especially the Zohar and the work of Cordovero, defending the Lurianic innovations as the proper interpretation of the inherited tradition rather than as a departure from it. And it establishes the hermeneutical principles by which Vital and his school read the Zohar, principles that the later gates will apply systematically in their exposition of cosmological and practical doctrines.

The book is shorter than the more detailed gates that follow it, but its importance as an entry point cannot be replaced by any other text. Without Sha'ar HaHakdamot the Lurianic system appears as a body of arcane technical doctrines without context; with it, the system becomes a coherent project with a recognizable starting point and a discernible internal logic. Generations of Lurianic students have begun their study with Sha'ar HaHakdamot precisely because the gate is designed to make the rest of the corpus intelligible.

The book also has a distinctive literary character. Where Etz Chaim and the more technical gates speak in a flat impersonal register that records doctrinal positions without commentary, Sha'ar HaHakdamot occasionally allows the voice of the redactor to come through. Vital sometimes addresses the reader directly, explains why a particular distinction matters, or warns against misreadings that the student might naturally make. These moments of pedagogical address give Sha'ar HaHakdamot a warmer texture than the rest of the Lurianic corpus and make it more accessible to a first reading.

The status of Sha'ar HaHakdamot within the eight-gate compendium has been disputed. Some traditional Lurianic Kabbalists count it as the first of the gates, making the eight a complete sequence beginning with Sha'ar HaHakdamot and ending with Sha'ar HaMitzvot. Others treat it as a separate prologue and count the eight gates as the substantive doctrinal volumes that follow it. Yossi Avivi's textual analysis has shown that the question is not merely formal: the manuscripts Shmuel Vital drew on did not have a uniform numbering system, and the conventional sequence was imposed by the editorial decisions of later printers rather than by any original authorial design. The current scholarly view is that the boundary between Sha'ar HaHakdamot and the rest of the corpus is fluid, and that the Eight Gates designation should be understood as a convenient editorial framework rather than as a strict architectural division.

Content

Sha'ar HaHakdamot is organized as a series of introductory chapters that move from the most general orientation to progressively more specific preparation for the technical doctrines of the later Lurianic gates. The exact division of chapters varies across the printed editions, but the substantive content can be described under several headings.

The opening chapters address the basic distinction between the Ein Sof and the sefirot, between the unknowable Infinite and the structure of emanation through which the Infinite becomes knowable. Vital takes considerable care in establishing this distinction because it is presupposed by everything that follows. He explains that the Ein Sof cannot be addressed in prayer, cannot be the subject of theological predication, and is not even properly described by the word God, since any predication requires a subject that can be characterized and the Ein Sof transcends all characterization. The sefirot, by contrast, are the structures through which the Infinite manifests, and they constitute the proper object of contemplation, prayer, and theological discourse.

The next chapters introduce the four worlds — Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, Asiyah — that constitute the descending architecture of creation. Vital explains that each world is a complete configuration of sefirot in itself, that the worlds are related by progressive concealment of the divine light, and that the human being lives in the lowest world of Asiyah while being structurally connected to the higher worlds through the soul. This introduction prepares the student for the more elaborate treatments of the four worlds in Etz Chaim and the practical applications in Sha'ar HaKavanot.

A subsequent series of chapters introduces the basic vocabulary of partzufim, the divine countenances. Vital does not yet undertake the full doctrinal exposition of the partzufim that Etz Chaim will provide; he simply installs the vocabulary so that the student will recognize the terms when they appear in the more demanding chapters. He explains that the partzufim emerged from the reconfiguration of the divine structure after the breaking of the vessels, that they are organized as five interrelated personalities, and that their interactions constitute the inner life of the divine.

Several chapters address the doctrine of tzimtzum in introductory form. Vital explains the basic shape of the doctrine without entering into the detailed metaphysical questions that Etz Chaim will address. He notes the existence of disagreement among earlier Kabbalists about whether the contraction is to be understood literally or metaphorically and indicates the position that the Lurianic school will take, deferring the full argument to the later gates.

The middle chapters of Sha'ar HaHakdamot are devoted to the question of how to read the Zohar. Vital establishes the hermeneutical principles by which the Lurianic school approaches the prior tradition: the Zoharic narrative is to be read as an encoded record of cosmological events, the stories of Rabbi Shimon and his disciples are figurative presentations of inner divine processes, and the apparent contradictions in the Zoharic text are to be resolved by reference to the Lurianic doctrinal framework. These principles became the standard hermeneutical lens for Lurianic students for centuries afterward.

A separate group of chapters addresses the relation between Lurianic doctrine and the Cordoverian system. Vital had been a student of Cordovero before Luria's arrival in Safed, and his early writings still bear the marks of Cordoverian categories. Sha'ar HaHakdamot devotes considerable attention to explaining how the Lurianic doctrines emerged from and surpassed the Cordoverian framework, arguing that Cordovero had grasped the basic structure of the divine but had not seen the cosmological catastrophe of the breaking of the vessels or the reconfiguration of the divine into partzufim.

The closing chapters of Sha'ar HaHakdamot turn to practical orientation. Vital addresses the moral and devotional preparation that the student of Lurianic Kabbalah ought to undergo, the prerequisites of Torah study and personal sanctity that he treats as preconditions of mystical understanding, and the warnings against premature or undisciplined engagement with the more demanding doctrines. These pastoral chapters give the book a warmer texture than the more austere doctrinal volumes and make explicit the spiritual ethos within which Lurianic study was meant to take place.

Key Teachings

The fundamental teaching of Sha'ar HaHakdamot is that the Ein Sof, the Infinite, must be sharply distinguished from the sefirot through which the Infinite manifests. The Ein Sof cannot be the subject of theological predication, cannot be addressed in prayer, and cannot be described by the divine names that the tradition uses. The sefirot, by contrast, are the structures through which the Infinite becomes knowable, and they are the proper object of contemplation and worship. This distinction is older than Lurianic Kabbalah but Sha'ar HaHakdamot presents it in the specific form that the rest of the Lurianic system requires, and it functions as the foundation on which the more elaborate doctrines are built.

A second teaching introduces the doctrine of the four worlds — Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, Asiyah — as the descending architecture of creation. Each world is a complete configuration of sefirot in itself, the worlds are related by progressive concealment of the divine light, and the human being lives in the lowest world while being structurally connected to the higher worlds through the soul. The four-world doctrine provides the framework within which the practice of mitzvot and prayer takes place: every action in the lower world has correlates in the higher worlds, and the practice of Lurianic Kabbalah depends on understanding how the human action below corresponds to the divine response above.

A third teaching introduces the partzufim, the divine countenances. Sha'ar HaHakdamot does not undertake the full doctrinal exposition that Etz Chaim will provide; it simply installs the vocabulary and the basic conceptual orientation. The partzufim are five interrelated personalities — Arikh Anpin, Abba, Imma, Zeir Anpin, and Nukva — that emerged from the reconfiguration of the divine structure after the breaking of the vessels. Their interactions constitute the inner life of the divine, and the practice of Lurianic Kabbalah is in significant part the contemplation of these interactions.

A fourth teaching addresses the doctrine of tzimtzum in introductory form. Vital explains the basic shape of the doctrine, indicates that there is dispute among earlier Kabbalists about whether the contraction is to be taken literally or metaphorically, and signals the position that the Lurianic school will defend in the more detailed treatments. The student is given enough orientation to recognize the doctrine when it appears in Etz Chaim but is not yet asked to commit to one or another reading.

A fifth teaching concerns hermeneutics: how to read the Zohar in light of the Lurianic doctrines. Vital establishes the principles that became the standard Lurianic approach to the prior tradition. The Zoharic narrative is to be read as an encoded record of cosmological events. The stories of Rabbi Shimon and his disciples are figurative presentations of inner divine processes. The apparent contradictions in the Zoharic text are to be resolved by reference to the Lurianic doctrinal framework. These hermeneutical principles shaped the way Lurianic students read the Zohar for centuries.

A sixth teaching addresses the relation between Lurianic doctrine and the Cordoverian system that preceded it. Vital argues that the Lurianic doctrines emerged from and surpassed the Cordoverian framework, that Cordovero had grasped the basic structure of the divine but had not seen the cosmological catastrophe of shevirah or the reconfiguration of the divine into partzufim. This positioning was crucial to the early reception of Lurianic Kabbalah in a Jewish world that had recently absorbed the Cordoverian synthesis as the standard form of Kabbalistic teaching.

A seventh teaching, more pastoral than doctrinal, concerns the moral and devotional preparation that the student of Lurianic Kabbalah ought to undergo. Vital insists that mystical understanding requires personal sanctity, that the study of Lurianic doctrine should not be undertaken without the appropriate preparation, and that premature engagement with the more demanding chapters can lead the student astray. These pastoral warnings give the book its distinctive ethos.

Translations

Sha'ar HaHakdamot has had an even more limited translation history than Etz Chaim. The book has never appeared in a complete English translation, and most English-language readers encounter its contents through the secondary literature rather than through direct translation of the primary text.

The original Hebrew was first printed in the eighteenth century as part of the broader project of bringing the Lurianic corpus into print. Earlier the text had circulated only in manuscript among the small circles of Lurianic students who were considered qualified to study it, and many traditional Kabbalists resisted the move from manuscript to print as a violation of the principle that Lurianic teaching should be transmitted only orally to prepared disciples. Boaz Huss has documented these controversies in his articles on the early printed editions of Lurianic Kabbalah, showing how the publication of the eight gates transformed both the audience and the meaning of the texts.

The Mantua-Venice Hebrew editions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became the standard form in which Sha'ar HaHakdamot was studied, and subsequent reprints in Jerusalem, Warsaw, and Vilna in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued the same textual tradition. The Ashlag Institute in Israel produced a printed edition with the commentaries of Yehuda Ashlag in the mid-twentieth century, which has become the standard pedagogical edition for contemporary Israeli students. Ashlag's commentary, like his commentary on Etz Chaim, has been partially translated into English by his disciples.

Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala Denudata, published at Sulzbach and Frankfurt between 1677 and 1684, includes Latin paraphrases of selected introductory passages but does not undertake a full translation of Sha'ar HaHakdamot. Knorr von Rosenroth's selections were the principal vehicle through which European Christian scholars encountered the introductory framework of the Lurianic system, though his renderings are often loose and shaped by his own theological commitments.

In the modern academic period, Lawrence Fine in Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos (Stanford University Press, 2003) provides the most extensive English-language exposition of the introductory framework, paraphrasing key passages and analyzing the doctrinal positions that Sha'ar HaHakdamot establishes. Yossi Avivi's three-volume Hebrew Kabbalat Ha-Ari, published by the Ben-Zvi Institute in 2008, contains the definitive textual analysis of the layered character of the introductions and the editorial decisions by which Shmuel Vital assembled the gate from his father's manuscripts. A complete scholarly translation into English remains an outstanding desideratum.

Controversy

The principal controversy surrounding Sha'ar HaHakdamot concerns the textual relations between the Vital and Sarug recensional traditions, the same dispute that runs through the entire Lurianic corpus. After Luria's death in 1572, several disciples produced their own written records of the master's oral teaching, and the introductory materials they wrote diverged on significant points. The Vital introductions, which Shmuel Vital later assembled into Sha'ar HaHakdamot, presented one understanding of the basic Lurianic vocabulary; the parallel introductions associated with Israel Sarug presented another. Sarug's recension was widely diffused in Italy and Eastern Europe in the early seventeenth century, and his version of the introductory framework shaped the way many Italian and Eastern European Kabbalists first encountered Lurianic doctrine. Vital's followers insisted that Sarug had never been an authentic disciple of Luria; Sarug's defenders insisted that Vital was guilty of jealousy and exclusivism. The dispute was sharpened by Vital's 1575 oath, which required his fellow disciples to swear not to teach Lurianic doctrine except through him.

A second controversy concerns the textual layers within the Vital introductions themselves. Yossi Avivi's three-volume Kabbalat Ha-Ari, published by the Ben-Zvi Institute in 2008, has shown that the materials Shmuel Vital assembled into Sha'ar HaHakdamot represent multiple stages of Chaim Vital's evolving understanding. Some sections appear to be early — bearing the marks of Vital's Cordoverian training before Luria's arrival in Safed — while other sections reflect the mature Lurianic system in its developed form. The result is that Sha'ar HaHakdamot is less a single composition than a layered anthology, and the various layers do not always agree on doctrinal points. Avivi's analysis has fundamentally changed the way contemporary scholarship reads the gate, and several positions that earlier readers took to be Vital's mature view have turned out to be vestiges of his earlier Cordoverian training.

A third controversy concerns the place of Sha'ar HaHakdamot within the eight-gate compendium. Some traditional Lurianic Kabbalists count it as the first of the gates, making the eight a complete sequence beginning with Sha'ar HaHakdamot and ending with Sha'ar HaMitzvot. Others treat it as a separate prologue and count the eight gates as the substantive doctrinal volumes that follow it. Avivi's textual analysis has shown that the question is not merely formal: the manuscripts Shmuel Vital drew on did not have a uniform numbering system, and the conventional sequence was imposed by the editorial decisions of later printers rather than by any original authorial design. The current scholarly view is that the boundary between Sha'ar HaHakdamot and the rest of the corpus is fluid and that the eight-gate designation should be understood as an editorial framework rather than as a strict architectural division.

A fourth dispute concerns the legitimacy of printing the introductions at all. Many traditional Lurianic Kabbalists held that Lurianic teaching should be transmitted only orally to qualified students and that bringing the introductions into print would expose the doctrines to readers who were not prepared for them. Boaz Huss has shown how these debates shaped the timing and the form of the early printed editions, and they have continued in attenuated form into the present.

Influence

Sha'ar HaHakdamot has had an influence that is at once deep and largely invisible. Because the book functions as an entry point rather than as a substantive doctrinal volume, its impact is felt indirectly: every reader who has approached the more famous Lurianic gates with comprehension has done so through the framework that Sha'ar HaHakdamot installs, and the structure of subsequent Lurianic pedagogy has been shaped by the introductory orientation it provides.

Within the Sephardic-Mizrachi Kabbalistic tradition, Sha'ar HaHakdamot became the standard starting point for the Lurianic curriculum at Beit El, the Jerusalem academy founded by Shalom Sharabi in the eighteenth century. Sharabi's commentarial school treated the introductions as foundational and developed an elaborate tradition of close reading that has continued to the present in the Sephardic Kabbalistic circles of Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo, and Beirut. Generations of Sephardic Kabbalists have begun their training with Sha'ar HaHakdamot before proceeding to Etz Chaim and the practical gates.

In the Eastern European context, both Hasidic and Mitnagdic Kabbalists drew on Sha'ar HaHakdamot as the basic introduction to Lurianic doctrine. The Hasidic masters from the Baal Shem Tov forward read the introductions through the lens of devekut and personal mystical experience, while the Mitnagdic Kabbalists of Lithuania, especially the Vilna Gaon and his disciples, treated them as the philological foundation for rigorous textual analysis of the Lurianic corpus. The differences between the two reading traditions often turned on how each interpreted particular passages in the introductions.

The Italian reception of Lurianic Kabbalah was shaped above all by Menachem Azariah da Fano and Naphtali Bacharach, who attempted to mediate between the Vital and Sarug introductory traditions and produced their own commentarial introductions that drew on both. Abraham Cohen de Herrera's Puerta del Cielo, written in Spanish in the early seventeenth century and later translated into Hebrew, attempted to harmonize the introductory framework of Lurianic Kabbalah with Renaissance Neoplatonism and exerted considerable influence on the Christian Kabbalah of the period.

The Christian Kabbalah of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, whose Kabbala Denudata of 1677-1684 brought selected Lurianic materials into Latin for European Christian scholars, drew on the introductory framework of Sha'ar HaHakdamot for its basic vocabulary and orientation. Through Knorr von Rosenroth the introductory framework entered the wider European intellectual world and shaped early modern philosophical engagements with Jewish mysticism, including those of Leibniz and other German philosophers.

In the modern academic period, the foundational work of Gershom Scholem in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken, 1941), the textual scholarship of Yossi Avivi in Kabbalat Ha-Ari, and the cultural-historical work of Lawrence Fine in Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos (Stanford University Press, 2003) have all drawn extensively on Sha'ar HaHakdamot as the primary source for the basic vocabulary and orientation of Lurianic Kabbalah. Without the introductory framework that the gate provides, the academic study of Lurianic doctrine would lack its starting point, and the modern reconstruction of Luria's system depends at every step on the introductions that Vital wrote and Shmuel Vital assembled.

Significance

Sha'ar HaHakdamot occupies the position in the Lurianic corpus that corresponds, in pedagogical terms, to the first chapter of a textbook: it is where the student learns the language in which everything subsequent will be conducted. Without that initial installation of vocabulary and conceptual orientation, the technical chapters of Etz Chaim and the practical chapters of the other gates would be unintelligible. The significance of the book is therefore as much architectural as doctrinal — its importance lies in its placement within the larger curriculum.

The doctrinal contributions of Sha'ar HaHakdamot include the basic distinctions that the later gates take for granted: between the Ein Sof and the sefirot, between essence and vessel, between the unknowable divine source and the manifestation of divinity through the structure of emanation. These distinctions are older than Lurianic Kabbalah, but Sha'ar HaHakdamot presents them in the specific form that the Lurianic system requires, preparing the student to encounter the doctrines of tzimtzum, shevirah, and partzufim that will follow. The book also establishes the basic vocabulary for the four worlds, the configurations of partzufim, and the relations between divine action and human response, giving the student a working glossary before the more demanding chapters arrive.

A second contribution concerns the hermeneutical principles by which the Lurianic school reads the prior tradition. Sha'ar HaHakdamot explains how to read the Zohar in light of the Lurianic doctrines, how to interpret the Zoharic stories of Rabbi Shimon and his disciples as encoded records of cosmological events, and how to relate Lurianic doctrine to the Cordoverian system that Vital had studied before Luria's arrival in Safed. These hermeneutical principles became the standard lens through which Lurianic students approached the entire prior literature for centuries afterward.

A third contribution lies in the book's defensive function. Lurianic Kabbalah introduced doctrines that had no clear precedent in the prior tradition, and many readers in the early seventeenth century resisted the new system as an unwarranted innovation. Sha'ar HaHakdamot devotes considerable attention to defending the Lurianic doctrines as the proper interpretation of the inherited tradition rather than as a departure from it, arguing that Luria recovered teachings that had been lost and that the Zohar contains hints of the doctrines that Lurianic Kabbalah makes explicit. This apologetic dimension was crucial to the early reception of the Lurianic system and helped to establish its authority in the wider Jewish world.

For the historian of Kabbalah, Sha'ar HaHakdamot is also significant as a window into the redactional process by which the Lurianic corpus came into being. The layered character of the book — the way different sections reflect different stages of Chaim Vital's evolving understanding — preserves a record of the development of Lurianic doctrine that the more polished chapters of Etz Chaim have erased. Yossi Avivi's textual scholarship has made the layers visible, allowing the modern reader to trace the formation of the Lurianic system through the introductions that Shmuel Vital assembled.

Connections

Sha'ar HaHakdamot stands at the threshold of the Lurianic corpus and connects in several directions to the broader history of Kabbalah and to the other texts in the Lurianic compendium itself.

The most immediate connection is to Etz Chaim, the master systematic work of which Sha'ar HaHakdamot is the pedagogical preparation. The introductions install the vocabulary and orientation that Etz Chaim presupposes, and the two volumes are best read in sequence. The other gates of the eight-gate compendium — Sha'ar HaKavanot, Sha'ar Ruach HaKodesh, Sha'ar HaGilgulim — also draw on the framework that Sha'ar HaHakdamot establishes, and Pri Etz Chaim assumes the reader has already absorbed the introductory material.

The book's authorship and redaction connect it to Chaim Vital, whose writings it draws on, and to Rabbi Isaac Luria, whose oral teaching Vital was attempting to record. The defense of Lurianic doctrine against earlier Kabbalistic positions also engages Moses Cordovero, whose system Vital had studied before Luria's arrival and whose categories the early layers of the Sha'ar HaHakdamot still reflect. The relation between the Cordoverian and Lurianic frameworks is a central concern of the introductions.

Backward in time, Sha'ar HaHakdamot presupposes the Zohar and develops the hermeneutical principles by which the Lurianic school reads it. The connection to the Zohar is foundational: Vital treats the Zohar as the encoded record of the cosmological drama that the Lurianic system makes explicit, and Sha'ar HaHakdamot explains how to read the Zoharic narrative in this Lurianic key. The book also presupposes the Cordoverian synthesis presented in Pardes Rimonim and frequently positions Lurianic doctrine in dialogue with it.

The competing recensional tradition associated with Israel Sarug produced its own introductory materials that diverged from those Vital wrote, and the relation between the two introductory traditions is one of the central problems of seventeenth-century Lurianic transmission. The work of Menachem Azariah da Fano in Italy attempted to mediate between the two recensions and produced its own commentarial introductions to the Lurianic system.

Forward in time, Sha'ar HaHakdamot shaped the way the entire Lurianic curriculum was taught in the centuries that followed. Shalom Sharabi at the Beit El academy in eighteenth-century Jerusalem developed his own commentarial tradition built on close reading of the introductions, and the modern Sephardic Kabbalistic schools in Jerusalem, Damascus, and Aleppo continue to begin their curriculum with Sha'ar HaHakdamot. The Hasidic and Mitnagdic Kabbalists of Eastern Europe also began with the introductions, though they often read them through their own distinctive lenses.

The book's connection to the broader doctrine of the sefirot and to Kabbalah as a whole is the connection of an introductory grammar to the language whose grammar it teaches. Within the Lurianic curriculum, no other text occupies the same place. The Lurianic Kabbalah tradition that emerged from Vital's redactional project depends on Sha'ar HaHakdamot for its accessibility, and the spread of the Lurianic system through Safed and beyond was enabled by the pedagogical preparation that the introductions provide.

Further Reading