Ethics and Mysticism in Eastern Mystical Traditions

Abstract

Ethics and mysticism, we are regularly instructed, are if not antithetical, then certainly, at the very least, unrelated. This common wisdom is predicated on a specific understanding of morality and a flawed, though widespread, conception of mysticism and mystical traditions. It is yet another distorted and distorting manifestation of the still more universal misapprehension that mystics are essentially arch-individualists, ‘Lone Rangers’ of the spirit, whose sole intention is to escape the religious environments that spawned them in order to find personal liberation or salvation. Accordingly, mystics are portrayed as rebels and heretics, antinomians and spiritual revolutionaries, if not also underminers of existing social and religious structures. But this characterization, despite its popularity, needs revision. In this essay it is not possible to argue all the detailed reasons why this construal is simply incorrect, but, as a shorthand summary of a much larger, more complex interpretative reconstruction, I would call attention to the fact that mystics share not only the metaphysical problematic, the metaphysical diagnosis of existence, as this is conceptualized within their particular traditions, but also view its overcoming or deconstruction in ways consistent with the teachings of their ‘faith’mmunities. They are, that is to say, fully situated in the ontological, theological, and social contexts of their traditions. Essentially, they share the Weltanschauung of their inherited circumstance and seek to realize, experience, the ‘solutions’ proposed by their tradition.