spirituality
The Chief Priest of the Shounji-Temple
at Osaka, Sodo Yasunaga,
has also questioned whether all mystical experience is the same. He compares
the experiences of light of St
Paul (65 CE), a convert to Christianity, and the Zen Buddhist master Hakuun
(1885-1973). Sodo Yasunaga asks:
If a Christian practices Zazan and has some kind of religious experience, should this be called a Zen experience or a God experience? If a Christian practitioner of Zazen experiences the “Great death”, does that person’s rebirth to a new life involve becoming conformed to Christ or to the original Buddha.
Photo courtesy and © Shizuko Mishima, Japan for Visitors http://gojapan.about.com
In
Hinduism, there has long been a debate between those who speak of the Absolute
and those those who speak of a Personal God. The central teaching of Advaita
Vedanta is that the Self is Brahman. Reality is non-dual. Although Sankara
(?788-820), the founder of Advaita Vedanta, allows a place for God, he held
that in realisation, the distinction of worshipper and worshipped vanishes.
Ramanuja (11th or 12th century), the founder of Visistadvaita, and Madhva
(13th century), the founder of Dvaita-Vedanta, however, said that this relationship
cannot be transcended.
The dispute has continued into modern times. Vivekananda wrote:
The idea of a Personal God, the Ruler and Creator of this universe, as he has been styled, the Ruler of Maya or nature, is not the end of these Vedantic ideas: it is only the beginning. The idea grows and grows until the Vedantist finds that He, who he thought, was standing outside, is he himself and is in reality within. He is the one who is free, but who through limitation thought he was bound.
Debendranath Tagore (1817-1905), a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, however, opposed the Absolutist position. Radhakrishnan suggested that the Absolute is beyond all human conceptions, but that we attribute personality to it as that is the highest category that we know. The personality of God is thus only a symbol, but a necessary one. For that is how God is to us although not what God is in himself.
Zaehner not only argues that there are different types of mystical experience but he also insists that theistic mystical experience is a richer experience. He quotes the fourteenth century Flemish mystic, Ruysbroeck, who attacked the monists of his time on the grounds that their mysticism was devoid of love. Because they found within themselves ‘sufficient rest’, they thought they had reached the highest bliss attainable by humans. In actual fact, Ruysbroek maintained, they were shutting themselves off from God, who is the source of inexhaustible love.
The contemporary Christian mystic, Wayne Teasdale, who recognises that there are different types of mystical experience, rejects arguments that one is superior to the other.
Although the ultimate goals are not identical, they are complementary. The religions need one another precisely
because they complete one another! Together, they enlarge our understanding of the ultimate.
Wayne Teasdale speaks of interspirituality, which
honours all the experiences and insight of each tradition and gathers these experiences into an organic synthesis. We awaken to this synthesis when we walk the intermystical path with an open heart and a capacity to be transformed in our understanding and in our being.
