Finding mysticism in unexpected places

In grad school I missed something that was right under my nose.

When I was in grad school, a big academic fashion was to heap scorn on the idea that mystical experience could be something cross-cultural: everything was reducible to social context, and the similarities of experience didn't really matter, as I had once argued myself. But the roots of that idea were often more asserted than argued: the famous article by Steven Katz, which inaugurated the approach, didn't bother to justify its assumption that "There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences", assuming perhaps that italics and capital letters were the only support necessary.

A little while ago I noted how Robert Forman's collection of essays illustrate "cool" mystical experiences, where distinctions of senses and self drop away and the mind ceases to fluctuate, in sources as varied as the Indian Yoga Sūtras, the Ukrainian Hasidic Dov Baer and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Something similar seems to be going on in the Sri Lankan systematizer Buddhaghosa and the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing, which both involve, in Ninan Smart's terms, a “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states.” And it turns out that once your mind is no longer prejudged to deny any cross-cultural similarity, you start noticing it in a lot of other places.

Eckhart and Baer are relatively marginal figures within the histories of Christianity and Judaism. The same is not at all true of the Zhuangzi, one of the two texts that are always referred to as core to philosophical Daoism. It's always hard to say anything with confidence about the Zhuangzi, composite text that it is. But once you've noticed how many other contexts cool mystical experience shows up in, then it's hard not to be struck by this passage from chapter 6:

"I'm making progress," said Yen Hui.
"What do you mean?" asked Confucius.
"I have forgotten rites and music."
"Not bad, but you still haven't got it."
Yen Hui saw Confucius again on another day and said, "I'm making progress."
"What do you mean?"
"I have forgotten humaneness and righteousness."
"Not bad, but you still haven't got it."
Yen Hui saw Confucius again on another day and said, "I'm making progress."
"What do you mean?"
"I sit and forget."
"What do you mean, 'sit and forget'?" Confucius asked with surprise.
"I slough off my limbs and trunk," said Yen Hui, "dim my intelligence, depart from my form, leave knowledge behind, and become identical with the Transformational Thoroughfare. This is what I mean by 'sit and forget'."
"If you are identical," said Confucius, "then you have no preferences. If you are transformed, then you have no more constants. It's you who is really the worthy one! Please permit me to follow after you."

"Gathering the Light", an image from the Daoist meditation text The Secret of the Golden Flower.

This translation is by Victor Mair, a Penn professor known for his cranky rants about popular misunderstandings of Chinese characters, so I feel confident that this is a serious scholarly translation, not just some random woolly hippie translating on vibes. And the state of mind described in this translated passage, where one sits and forgets (zuòwàng 坐忘) in order to "dim my intelligence, depart my form, leave knowledge behind": that sure looks a lot like Dov Baer saying one should “forget oneself totally”, like Eckhart saying “a man should flee his senses, turn his powers inward and sink into an oblivion of all things and himself” – like the “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states” in Buddhaghosa and the Cloud of Unknowing.

But where I was even more startled to notice this kind of mystical forgetting is in Śāntideva. After all, I did my dissertation on the guy! Yet with my grad-school anti-mystical blinkers on, for a good two decades I had managed to neglect the significance of Bodhicaryāvatāra verse IX.34:

When neither existents nor nonexistents stand before the mind, then, because it has no other destination, then the mind, without objects, becomes tranquil.

The Tibetan historians Butön and Tāranātha had no such neglect. They tell the story of Śāntideva's first reciting the text, and say that when he got to this specific verse, he floated into the air and his body disappeared, the remaining lines recited by a disembodied voice. I don't believe that description as a historical account, but it's a strong indicator that the Tibetans viewed this verse as a particularly powerful spiritual realization.

And the content of that verse, what constitutes the realization, is striking. It is about a mind emptying itself of content, where neither existents nor nonexistents stand before it – one might say "leaving knowledge behind", or "sinking into an oblivion of all things and himself". There isn't a physical practice of sitting, the way there is in Zhuangzi; the verse is part of a metaphysical argument, responding to a hypothetical Yogācāra objector. But what appears here is an intentionally tranquil, objectless state of mind, leaving behind distinctions, that sure sounds a lot like those described by revered sages in very different times and places – whether it's Eckhart's "oblivion of all things and himself" or the Yoga Sūtras' "cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness".

The comparison here is still in relatively broad strokes; we shouldn't jump to the conclusion that these experiences are all exactly the same. Still, I'm having a harder and harder time accepting the conclusion that it's social construction all the way down. People in different cultures put different cultural meanings and values on rainfall and the way it makes plants grow, but all across the world they still know what rain is and the fact that it makes plants grow. And it does seem that in many unconnected parts of at least the Old World, revered sages see that a practice of forgetting things and self – by whatever means – can lead one to a spiritually beneficial state of mind.