Mystical experiences in the inner chapters of Zhuangzi

Summary

Many sinologists have labeled Zhuangzi's writings as mystical, but they do so without engaging the scholarly literature on mysticism. This analysis examines three specific passages from the Zhuangzi—the "riding the wind" section, the "Ziqi" dialogue, and the "sitting and forgetting" dialogue—to provide an explicit hermeneutic for understanding mysticism in the text. The proposed hermeneutic holds that mystical experiences transcend ego and sensory perception through esoteric practices involving ecstasy, leading the practitioner to experience what they consider the true nature of reality. The ecstatic experience of the egoless state itself is more central to mystical experience than unity with a divine other, which is absent from two of the three passages analyzed.

Study at a glance

Abstract

"Mysticism" is a phenomenon which many sinologists have attributed to Zhuongzi. The problem is that they make this attribution in passing and without much reference to literature on the subject of mysticism itself. By analysing three specific examples of mystical experience in Zhuongzi and explicating them in terms of literature on mysticism, I provide a more explicit hermeneutic for the understanding of mysticism in Zhuongzi. The three sections of Zhuongzi I analyse in this thesis are the "riding the wind" section as well as the "Ziqi" and "sitting and forgetting" dialogues. I engage with the ways these sections of text have previously been labelled "mystical" and explain their mystical dimensions in explicit terms. I develop and test a hermeneutic of mysticism which holds that "mystical experiences" transcend ego and sensory perception through esoteric practices which involve ecstasy and ultimately lead the practitioner to experience what she/he considers to be the true nature of reality. I argue that the ecstatic experience of the egoless state in and of itself is more important to mystical experience than another more commonly presupposed element — unity with some kind of "divine other" — which does not exist in the "riding the wind" section and the "Ziqi dialogue."