Tibetan Buddhism and Mystical Experience

Abstract

This book connects the Tibetan Buddhist polemics over realization of ultimate reality with contemporary debates regarding mystical experience. It argues that realization of ultimate reality as understood by Tibetan thinkers on the one hand in significant ways resembles the category of unmediated mystical experience, and on the other challenges and suggests rethinking the very meaning of that category. Correspondingly, the book proposes to move beyond the interpretive models used by “constructivists” and “perennialists” in their debates regarding unmediated mystical experience to a different model used by Tibetan Buddhist thinkers. According to that model, the direct realization of ultimate reality is not mediated by any concepts or mental constructs at the time of its actual occurrence, but it is necessarily mediated by conditioning contemplative processes leading to it. Consequently, the book suggests that in order to understand this type of mystical experience, one has to shift attention from the resultant experience per se to the deconstructive processes that condition it. It is here, it argues, that one should search for elements responsible for differences and similarities of experiences of ultimate reality addressed by different traditions. Exploring conflicting positions on realization of reality held by seminal Tibetan thinkers Tsongkhapa and Gorampa, the book shows that differences between mediating conceptual processes proposed by them pertain mostly to the conflicting descriptions of those conditioning processes, as well as minor variations in those processes, while on the practical level those processes are equally effective in terms of leading to the same realization of ultimate reality.