Zen and the Unspeakable God reevaluates how we study mystical experience. Forsaking the prescriptive epistemological box that has constrained the conversation for decades, ensuring that methodology has overshadowed subject matter, Jason Blum proposes a new interpretive approach-one that begins with a mystic's own beliefs about the nature of mystical experience. Blum brings this approach to bear on the experiential accounts of three mystical exemplars: Meister Eckhart, Ibn al-'Arabi, and Hui-neng. Through close readings of their texts, he uncovers the mystics' own fundamental assumptions about transcendence and harnesses these as interpretive guides to their experiences.
The predominant theory-first path to interpretation has led to the misunderstanding and misrepresentation of individual mystical experiences and fostered specious conclusions about cross-cultural comparability among them. Blum's hermeneutic invites the scholarly community to begin thinking about mystical experience in a new way-through the mystics' eyes. Zen and the Unspeakable God offers a sampling of the provocative results of this technique and an explanation of its implications for theories of consciousness and our contemporary understanding of the nature of mystical experience.
- ISBN10 0271070803
- ISBN13 9780271070803
- Publish Date 15 October 2016 (first published 30 September 2015)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Pennsylvania State University Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 200
- Language English