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This particular Buddhist text is quite beautiful prose, partly due to the particular translation, and partly due to the influence of Taoism. Taoist poetry also lacks ecstatic language, but the verses attributed to Lao Tzu in The Tao Te Ching, as well as those written by other early Taoists, are often highly poetic. If these poems are not ecstatic in nature, they still give us a sense of the sublime.

The Nature of Perception

Although Buddhists are atheistic, the historical Buddha never specifically denied the existence of "God." He simply had no use for ontological debate on the subject. He pointed out that philosophizing about the nature of Reality was pointless; it did not relieve suffering. For the Buddha, the most important goal was to discover the nature of the mind that perceives Reality!

Just as Jesus used parables to encourage his listeners to access their intuitive minds, the Buddha did not tell his disciples what the true nature of mind is. Instead, he encouraged them to find out for themselves. Using a dialectic form of teaching, the Buddha rejected every answer about the nature of mind that came from intellectual reasoning rather than from direct insight.

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In the Zen Buddhist tradition, Zen masters give novice monks a riddle, or koan, to solve. The riddle, however, is intentionally unsolvable. The monk doesn't fully comprehend this at first, so he makes an all-out effort to solve the riddle using the reasoning process of his mind. Every time the monk thinks he has the right answer, he tells the Zen master. But instead of praise he receives a whack from the Zen master's bamboo cane.

By using this method of teaching, the Zen master is trying to push the monk's discursive mind to the breaking point. If a monk is ultimately successful, it is only because his thinking mind finally short-circuits. The moment the mind exhausts itself and shuts down—wham! Satori!

One day after long years of practice on the part of the monk, the Zen master asks for the solution to the riddle yet again. While this time the monk gives an answer that would make little sense to you or me, the Zen master perceives it differently. Instead of smacking the monk with his cane, he just smiles—knowing that the monk has finally attained illumination.

Years ago it occurred to me that I had no objective means of knowing whether what I perceived as "objective" reality was, in fact, objectively real. The philosophy of solipsism holds that no reality exists outside the individual mind. While I was not ready to go that far, I did understand that I could not confirm the existence—or the nonexistence—of objective reality because supposedly objective information was still being processed through my subjective mind.

Such philosophizing tends to annoy people. Were I to state these sentiments to someone, he or she might stomp on my foot, and ask: "Oh, yeah? Is that pain objectively real or not?" I would only annoy them further—and gain a second crippled foot—by stating that there was still no way of knowing. The pain, after all, was subjective. In our normal, or default consciousness there is simply no way to confirm or deny objective reality.

Perception is the essence of mysticism, and that raises an important consideration. If we attain Enlightenment, the enlightened experience itself is, quite literally, subjective. This may account for the different ways mystics describe Ultimate Reality.

It also appears that there are different stages and levels of Enlightenment. The Hindu's experience of Samadhi is described as a state of bliss, and doesn't sound quite like the Zen experience of Satori. And Zen Satori doesn't sound quite like the final Buddhist experience of Nirvana.

Though Hindu, Christian, and Sufi mystics often describe their experience of Ultimate Reality in ecstatic terms, one can also find in their literature the warning not to remain in this state. Buddhists take this for granted. Ecstasy, bliss, is apparently not the highest state of awareness.

If Buddhists pay little attention to states of ecstasy in their literature, it is probably not because they don't experience them, but because ecstasy represents just one more level of consciousness where one can get stuck. After all, ecstatic states of consciousness can be achieved by using psychedelic drugs, but the drug experience is not Enlightenment.

Taoist mystical expression is different yet again. The ancient Taoists wrote about achieving harmony with Tao, the way things are; to go with the flow, not against it. As a consequence, much of Taoist literature, like much of Chan Buddhist literature, is based on becoming completely transparent to the natural order of things. To disappear into Tao, to become nobody, is stressed in all mystical systems, but it is emphasized most often in Taoist poetry.