This article presents the Confucian teaching of self-transcendence and its modern implications for interreligious dialogue. It first points out that most scholars in the field of interreligious dialogue share a common tendency to rely very heavily on Western concepts and/or Christian theological approaches. My discussion of self-transcendence is based on the classical teaching of Confucius and...
The Huichol Indians of west Mexico practice an indigenous form of shamanism in the Sierra Madre, but their shamanic art is now sold in the global marketplace. Through the visual medium of yarn paintings—a religious offering transformed into commercial art—Hui— chol artists describe their gods, shamanic curing and ceremony. Shamanic art may be seen as a mode of discourse about shamanic...
The hermeneutical and the epistemological paradigms for understanding mystical experience are not easily translated into each other. The hermeneutical model has the advantage in that it shifts the emphasis from explanation to understanding. Mystical experience, namely, the falling away of the factical conditions of human existence and the meeting with Infinite Being, cannot be reduced to...
The current discussion in philosophy of mysticism is heading down two divergent lines. Contextualist studies (notably Steven Katz) employ a linguistic model of the epistemic subject. Critics of contextualism (notably Robert Forman) have offered what this study calls a cognitionalist approach which draws attention to the performance of the conscious subject. The two approaches are combined by...
Professor Janz (SR, 24, 1 [1995]: 77) proposes an explanation of mystical experience based on an analogy with the hermeneutical process of reading a book. While this model has its advantages, it represents an attempt to analyze non-intentional mysticism on the basis of intentional experiences. Such mysticism, an experience of our own consciousness, is very different from thinking and sensing;...