The aim of this study is to investigate the meaning of mysticism in Indian Buddhism. This task is accomplished through a religion-phenomenological analysis trying to relate the ideas exed in Buddhist texts to certain human ways of experiencing one's being-in-the-world. Underlying this approach is a view of religious texts as "tracks" of various kinds of human experiences, mystical and otherwise.
Mystical experiences are here understood against the background of Heidegger's and Gadamer's idea of a linguistic basis of human reality. In mystical experience, this basis is transcended, and reality is experienced without the boundaries of language and discursive thinking. The specific characteristics of mystical experience have been adopted from Paul Griffiths' division of mystical experience into three types: 1) an experience of pure consciousness, 2) an unmediated experience, and 3) a nondualistic experience. The presence of any of these characteristics allows us to regard an experience as mystical.
In the first case, a person is conscious, although his or her consciousness is not directed towards any content and does not have as its phenomenological attribute visual, olfactory or any other type of sensory experience. In the second case, we have a mental event that may have as its necessary condition a certain (culture-bound) conceptual scheme without it being necessary that the phenomenological attributes or content of the mental event in question reflect any element of that conceptual scheme. The third case refers to a mental event whose phenomenological attributes or content do not include any structural opposition between subject and object.[...]