Abstract
On the basis of many years of personal experience the paper describes Buddhist meditation (Zazen, Vipassanā) as a mystical practice. After a short discussion of the role of some central concepts (longing, suffering, and love) in Buddhism, William James’ concept of religious experience is used to explain the goal of meditators as the achievement of a special kind of an experience of this kind. Systematically, its main point is to explain the difference between (on the one hand) a craving for pleasant ‘mental events’ in the sense of short-term moods, and (on the other) the long-term project of achieving a deep change in one’s attitude to life as a whole, a change that allows the acceptance of suffering and death. The last part argues that there is no reason to call the discussed practice irrational in a negative sense. Changes of attitude of the discussed kind cannot be brought about by argument alone. Therefore, a considered use of age-old practices like meditation should be seen as an addition, not as an undermining of reason.
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20 December 2017
The paper was written for and planned to be published within the present collection of papers on Mood. Due to an editorial error, it has been published in Philosophia 45:2 (2017) 773-787 rather than here.
Notes
For the details of my interpretation cf. Schneider 2014.
As a consequence one cannot define mysticism as a ‘personal encounter with God’ because mysticism can also be found in Buddhism, a religion without a God in the Christian sense.
For a famous Muslim use of the analogy cf. the tale about Layla and Majnun.
When translating the Pāli word taṇhā it is advisable to distinguish religious longing (i.e. what motivates a person to engage in a mystical practice) from desire or craving (i.e. from something that the practice is meant to overcome). The Cartesian misunderstanding discussed below can then be seen as an unintended and unhelpful transformation of religious longing by which it becomes just one more of the person’s cravings and desires.
So the proposal here is to strictly separate an ordinary-language use of the term ‘to cause’, like in ‘my scolding of his behavior caused him to be more cooperative’ from a use at home in the natural sciences. When James speaks of a case in which “something ideal … actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways” (James, Varieties, 523) this way of speaking belongs to the first category, the category of a mental influence. To accept this way of speaking does not justify the claim that his approach would “preserve a contact with ‘science’ which the ordinary theologian lacks.” (James, Varieties, 512) The underlying question here is: Can (and in what sense can) Psychology be a science?
Cf. von Wright 1998.
Cf. Schneider 2016.
References
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Schneider, H. J. (2016). Empirische Metaphysik? Sprachphilosophische Anmerkungen zur Interpretation buddhistischer ‚Erleuchtungserfahrungen’. In A.-B. Renger (Ed.), Erleuchtung. Kultur- und Religionsgeschichte eines Begriffs (pp. 159–176). Herder: Freiburg.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of this paper were read at the workshop ‘Longing, Suffering, and Love in Mystical Theory and Practice’, organized by Amber Griffioen and Mohammad Sadegh Zahedi at the University of Konstanz, July/August 2015, and also at the Department of Philosophy of Fudan-University, Shanghai, November 2015. - I would like to thank the Konstanz organizers and the discussion partners at both places for valuable comments. I also want to thank Eberhard Guhe and Timothy Doyle for helpful suggestions concerning my discussion of Buddhism and T. Doyle also for checking my English.
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A correction to this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9925-x.
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Schneider, H.J. Buddhist Meditation as a Mystical Practice. Philosophia 45, 773–787 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9783-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9783-y