Unjversity of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, ltd.
london, England
Copyright 1985 by The Regents of the Universi!y of California
Libruy of Congren Cataloging in Publication Data
Proudfoot, Wayne, 1939-
Religious experience.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Experience (Religion) I. Ttt1e.
BL53.P819 1985 291.4' 2 84-23928
ISBN 978-0-520-06128-6 (alk. paper)
Printed in the United States of America
08 07 06
12 11 10 9
The paper used in this publication is both acid-free and totally
chlorine-free (TCF). It meets the minimum requirements of
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viii CONTENTS
IV. Mysticism
The Search for a Mystical Core
Ineffability
Noetic Quality
Anomaly and Authority
V. Explication
The "Sense" of James' s Varieties
Sensible Authority
Religious Experience
VI. Explanation
The Problem
Descriptive and Explanatory Reduction
Protective Strategies
Force
Explaining Religious Experience
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
119
120
124
136
148
155
156
169
179
190
191
196
199
209
216
228
237
249
261
184 EXPLICATION
not on the subject matter or content of the experience, but on
its noetic quality or its significance for the truth of religious
beliefs. But now we must confront a difficulty we have ignored
heretofore. Seldom do people actually describe or identify their
experiences as religious. In fact , the possibility of doing so is
very recent and is restricted for the most part to the modern
West. People understand and identify their experiences in
terms of the concepts and beliefs available to them. But religion
is a term that is relatively recent in origin and belongs to the
history of Western ideas.IJ Smith (1964) has argued persua-
sively that this concept was not available to the adherents of
most of the traditions we identify as religious. Attempts to
translate similar terms from other cultures as "religion" often
distort the meaning of those terms. The same is true of our
use of mysticism. In the previous chapter we spoke of subjects
identifying their experiences as mystical. In fact, however,
even the possibility of identifying one' s experience as mystical
is only as recent as the availability of that term. Most indi-
viduals whom we might want to call mystics did not identify
their experiences as mystical.
In the modern West, at least since the eighteenth century,
the concept of religious experience has been available, so
people could identify and understand their experiences in this
way. James's Varielies could only have been written in a culture
in which there was some meaning to the concept of religious
experience. Although most of James's examples come from
Christian cultures, they often diverge from the orthodox tradi-
tion, and he views them as exemplifying a kind of experience
that has instances in many different traditions. The concept of
a religious experience, as distinct from Christian conversion,
Buddhist meditation, or Jewish study or prayer, is a recent one.
Were we to explicate our concept of religious experience as
an experience that the subject identifies as religious, we
would be forced to admit that religious experiences have been
EXPLICA TlON 185
confined to the modern West. A good case could be made
for this conclusion. The criteria that have been proposed by
Schleiermacher, Otto, and others for the identification of the
religious moment in experience are criteria that have a history
and that employ concepts that are recent and culture specific. If
only experiences that are apprehended by their subjects in
those terms are to be counted as religious experiences, then
the phenomenon is a very recent one. If, however, we want to
accommodate in our explication of the concept its use to refer
to experiences of persons to whom the term religious or its
counterparts are not available, we must revise our account .
The explication, to be useful, ought to capture some of our
intuitions about the concept, and one of those is that it should
be applicable to experiences outside the modern West.
We might just say that a religious experience is an expe-
rience that the subject identifies as Christian, Buddhist, Jewish,
Hindu, etc. , where the elcffera stands for a list of traditions we
consider religious. But, of course, these terms also vary in
their origins and their availability to members of those tradi-
tions. Perhaps most Christians have considered themselves
Christians, but the parallel claim cannot be made for Hindus or
for followers of Shinto. An experience must be specified under
a description that can be ascribed to the subject, and it is the
task of the historian of religions to identify the particular con-
cepts and descriptions available to people in particular contexts
and to disentangle them from our anachronistic tendency to
ascribe our concepts to those people. This is what much of the
study of religion is about. Careful textual study of the Pali
scriptures, Tibetan commentaries, and Buddhism in East Asia
can help us sort out the particular concepts and assumptions
that were available to Buddhists at different points in that
complex tradition, as well as cases in which scriptural author-
ity and local traditions came into conflict. Much of the same
kind of work has been done for Christianity and Judaism.