The Camaldolese Institute
for East-West Dialogue

Mystical Experience as Text: The Literary Expression of Transcending in the Cloud of Unkowing and the Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch

by Nicholas Koss, OSB

Holy men and women, thinkers on religious matters, founders of religions, and those who have transcendent experiences have at times put into writing ideas related to human life and religion. The putting into writing makes these persons writers as well religious men and women. A writer, consciously or unconsciously, uses literary techniques to present and organize raw material in a written form. What is particularly arresting about texts of the religious writer is that on occasion what is to be described is quintessentially incompatible with being preserved in writing. Religious experiences, especially those going by the name of mystic, are non-literary, and well beyond any textual rendering. Nonetheless, there is a grand tradition of texts, including well-known examples from Western and Chinese religions, attempting to capture the ineffable. This essay will attempt to study two of these texts.

First, I will examine some of the literary and structural aspects of the autobiographical section of The Platform Sutra, a fundamental text for Chan Buddhism, in search of the historical Hui-neng to see if he might have qualities that reveal what is called in the Western tradition purity of heart. My approach to this text has been strongly influenced by textual and literary analyses of the Bible done during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which have shed great light on the composition of the Bible as well as the manner of presentation of its content. I am not a trained Biblical scholar but as a monk I have for years delighted in reading biblical scholarship. At the same time, I am a long-time student of comparative literature. studying both Western and Chinese literature, so I have spent much time in attempting to analyze works of literature. Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, students of literature limited their focus to a clearly set canon of literary works. but recent literary theory often considers literature in its broadest possible sense, going from anything that has been written all the way to anything that is sign producing.