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Are Buddhists mystics?
lobster
Veteran
I once heard ajahn Sumedo tell his monks and particularly his nuns, 'we are not mystics'. The nuns were all into Rumi at the time and as far as I was aware, were in a better place than a lot of the monks . . .
There is a lot of nonsense that is described as mysticism, just as a lot of nonsense is associated with dharma. However the developed mystic knowledge has more in common with realisation than with for example scientific knowing . . .
Have you transcended labels or are you still a misfit mystic . . . Or is that just me? :wave:
There is a lot of nonsense that is described as mysticism, just as a lot of nonsense is associated with dharma. However the developed mystic knowledge has more in common with realisation than with for example scientific knowing . . .
Have you transcended labels or are you still a misfit mystic . . . Or is that just me? :wave:
0
Comments
Many Buddhists are mystics in the way they view Enlightenment and Samsara, in their seeing Buddha Nature as something hidden beneath the illusion of this life, and a mind has to be transformed into an elevated state of consciousness in order to achieve this connection. If that is the teaching and practice, then go with it. However, many Buddhists see Enlightenment from a mystical viewpoint like this even when the particular teachings of their practice point out this is not it.
Using Zen speak, I'd explain it by saying a mystic considers our human experience to be empty of meaning, and that seeing past that emptiness to the true form underneath it all is our goal. For Zen, at least, there is not "underneath or transcendent or hidden reality" to achieve. Form and emptiness are the same thing. Nothing hidden about it. No secret rites or altered states of consciousness needed. Only a clear mind.
But the interesting thing with this mystical component in Buddhism is that it's tempered with a lot of very down-to-earth observation, logic, and discipline. So it's not exclusively mystical; it also has a very rational aspect. Kind of yin and yang in quality, isn't it?
I can’t find the reference right now but that’s how one Zen Master started a conversation about the nature of reality.
It says we can’t deny the reality of the phenomenal world but we also can’t stick to our conventional understanding of it.
So I think as a Buddhist I am a mystic but this mysticism is not about anything special. It is about real phenomena; about life here and now just as it is.
We wake up to “God” who is not in heaven but who is right in front of our noses. And that we may call “the identity of relative and absolute”.
The key – the way I see it – to the mysticism of Buddhism is that we stop putting layers of words, concepts and preferences on top of reality.
Before we can give names like “here and now”; before we can separate subject and object conceptually; before we can think about spiritual or mundane; the truth is revealed immediately. But we will never know it; not conceptually. We can never grasp it.
We can never escape the trap the Master lays out for us if we enter the realm of affirmation and denial.
In this sense, the actual problem is that we are 'otherwordly'--we want anything but THIS world--our minds are always wandering somewhere else, chasing ghosts. We prefer our ideas about reality to being that reality itself, and this reality is not somewhere else, but is always im-mediate.