Sebastian Gäb

It has often been claimed, e.g. by William James or Aldous Huxley, that mystical experiences across times and cultures exhibit a striking similarity. Even though the words and images we use to describe them are different, underneath the surface we find a common experiential core. Others have rejected this claim and argued that all experiences are intrinsically shaped by the mystics’ pre-existing religious concepts. Against these constructivist objections, I defend the idea of a common core by arguing that even if all experience is interpreted through concepts, there could still be a common core. Those who reject the common core thesis usually argue that no distinction between experience and interpretation can be made since all experience is per se already interpreted. The notion of an uninterpreted experience is self-defeating. Drawing on current research on nonconceptual mental content, I argue that experiences can have nonconceptual content; that interpretation must be understood as conceptualization and that conceptualization presupposes a raw mental content that is not conceptualized. This raw content is not experienced as nonconceptual. Rather, the nonconceptual, uninterpreted common core is an abstraction which shows itself only through reflection. Thus, the existence of a common core is compatible with the fact that all experiences are interpreted.

Huayan Buddhism is famous for three doctrines: holism – the view that the whole of reality is contained in every single thing and that all things interpenetrate each other; idealism – the view that reality is mind; and finally, pantheism (or rather, panbuddhism) – the view that all of reality is contained within the one Buddha-Mind. While the doctrine of holism and the idea of an interpenetration of all things have received quite some attention from contemporary philosophers, they have largely ignored Huayan’s idealist side. In this paper, however, I will argue that these doctrines cannot be understood separately. According to Huayan’s holistic concept of emptiness, all things are empty insofar as their nature depends on the nature of other things, and vice versa. It has been claimed that this position collapses into either of two undesirable alternatives: metaphysical nihilism or relativism. Against this, I will argue that the only way to make sense of Huayan’s apparently paradoxical holism is an idealist metaphysics, which regards phenomenal things as mental objects and claims that reality is identical with the one absolute Buddha-Mind.