permeated meditation with an ethicized philosophy. Mysticism emerges now
in the sense of a philosophy of those who practice meditation. It might seem
that the mystical philosophy is derived from the experience of meditation: an
aconceptual insight into what lies behind experience and which has a powerful
motivating effect. The Buddhists refer to enlightenment, one of whose compo-
nents is the experience of an inner light, and to the bliss of deep meditation.
These might seem to be experiential inputs which shape the philosophy.
Nevertheless, meditation is shaped by the direction of philosophy more
than the reverse. There are two sorts of reasons. Historical comparisons turn
up a wide variety of techniques of meditation,^25 and an equally great variety
of ways in which the experiences of meditation are interpreted.^26 Meditative
experiences do not speak for themselves, nor do they even occur without an
understanding of what one is seeking, an understanding shaped by the social
group in which meditation takes place. Abstract or transcendental interpreta-
tions of meditation do not appear until a community of intellectual debaters
has developed abstract philosophy.
A common interpretation holds that mysticism is a result of despair at
worldly conditions. This would presumably apply only to the varieties of
mysticism which aim at otherworldly transcendence. But in fact the historical
correlation is not at all good. Buddhist mysticism originated in a time of
economic growth and unprecedented prosperity in the Ganges civilization. In
China, mysticism became important in the prosperous T’ang dynasty, and the
spread of Ch’an monasteries was most pronounced during the late T’ang-Sung
transition, when the rural commercial economy was taking off; the height of
medieval Chinese proto-capitalism, the late Sung, was the period when medi-
tation spread into the Neo-Confucian movement.
The more apt generalization is that otherworldly mysticism is especially
likely to thrive in a social structure which favors monasticism. Periods when
monasteries are expanding are high points of mysticism, and these are times
when monasteries are agents of economic growth in the countryside. Lay-ori-
ented movements of meditative practice, by contrast, have a strong organiza-
tional potential as a basis for political movements, especially in authoritarian
societies which allow no other means of political mobilization outside the
aristocratic families. It is here—as in the Taoist political movements in China,
the Sufi political movements in the Islamic world, and the Kabbalist movements
in medieval Judaism—that mysticism turns into political activism. Of another
sort are the hedonistic-intellectualistic versions of mysticism, such as the “Sages
of the Bamboo Grove” of the Three Kingdoms period in China, or the occult-
ism of educated Europeans around 1900, revived in the psychedelic “counter-
culture” of 1960s hippies. These take place in prosperous, even pampered
social classes; if such movements sometimes coincide with times of political up-
206 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Asian Paths