Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics

10. Ultimacy and Conventionality in Religious Experience

174 ten Ultimacy and Conventionality in Religious Experience Joseph S. O’Leary To what extent is mystical experience shaped by language? To what extent does it touch on an absolute, immediately given, beyond the grasp of language ? This is a tired old question, but we can perhaps renew it and make it fruitful by drawing on the Indian topos of the two-fold truth (dva-satya), taken as a theory of how conventional historical religious languages can serve as vehicles for insight or revelation having the quality of ultimacy. I shall use ultimacy freely here as a phenomenological term, meaning that which is recognized as supremely, undeniably, unsurpassably real. It does not have the metaphysical implication of terms such as absolute or transcendent, nor does it have, as these do, the status of a unitary principle. It is more adjectival than substantive, in that it can attach to a great variety of experiences. Yet it is not merely subjective, but is recognized by the subject as irreducible bedrock reality. A question that will occupy us in the following pages is the degree to which not merely the conventional languages of religion, but even the ultimacy of which they are a vehicle, can be conceived of as a pluralistic, culturally contextual phenomenon. Mâdhyamika Buddhism connects the lighting up of ultimate reality Ultimacy and Conventionality 175 (paramârtha-satya) to the skillful deployment of a given conventional set-up (samvrti-satya): ‘‘Without a foundation in the conventional truth, the significance of the ultimate cannot be taught.’’1 All the realities of our world have a merely conventional existence; the ultimate truth about them is their emptiness ; yet the truth of emptiness is realized only in constantly dismantling the delusions of substantiality to which the conventional world gives rise. As Mâdhyamika reflection advances, the ultimate truth becomes increasingly elusive, so that in the end we seem left with little more than a skillful play with conventions. The two-truths theory is a logical and historical quagmire; even within Mâdhyamika there is an endless variety of interpretations of its meaning .2 Still, I believe the theory can free up our thinking on the historical and textual embeddedness of mystical experience. Or rather, it abolishes the entire idea of ‘‘mystical experience,’’ which is all too redolent of a fixated clinging to a reified ultimacy. The idea of ‘‘the emptiness of emptiness’’ thwarts any tendency to cling to emptiness itself as a privileged object of a special experience, and sends us back instead to engagement in the world, an engagement that has become free, vital, and creative because emptied of fixations. In the present essay I shall not enter into any details of Buddhist debate, but merely allow a general sense of the interplay of the two truths to guide my reflections. I shall argue that the embeddedness of religious experience in a given historical, cultural, traditional, and linguistic context means that that experience cannot be treated as a pure delivery of ultimate reality. Certainly any attempt to formulate it as such is immediately compromised. Ultimacy can only be indicated obliquely by the torsions of a manifestly non-ultimate language . Even silence, situated at the end of a traversal of speech, is always located as a signifier within a certain cultural context: a world separates the silence of Vimalakîrti from that of the Pseudo-Dionysius. Ultimacy is encountered situationally, as confirmation and fulfillment of a pre-given language but also as revelation of its inadequacy. At the very point where the conventional web of religious discourse is most charged with a sense of the ultimate, it is also shown up in its thinness, almost to the point of breaking. Here the text will start using the negative terminology of ineffability or incomprehensibility, or will burst into poetic metaphor or nonsensical paradox, mantras, glossolalia. In the past there was a certain security in such apophatic rhetoric, for the writer was securely situated in prayer before the divine incomprehensibility. Today our religious metaphors are more likely to have a spectral quality, as remnants and quotations from an historical repertory. Very interesting to the theologian are those figures, such as Plotinus and Augustine, who after experiencing a powerful encounter with ultimate reality turn back to the realm of conventional language, which they revise in light of the encounter. Mysticism thus impresses its mark on language. The comprehensive critical labors of the Neo-Platonists or the Mâdhyamika thinkers...