by Tang Huyen

"The Buddhist business is the letting go of all experience, including that letting go."

Buddhism teaches the meditative states (the four form meditations, the
four formless attainments, the four Divine Abodes, etc.) which can
contain ecstatic experiences (the third form meditation is supposed to
be the happiest state, and above it experience is getting more and more
equanimous and aethereal, therefore is instatic rather than ecstatic).
There are also garden-variety ecstatic experiences of all kinds.

Yet Buddhism is not in the ecstatic experiences per se, but in the
letting go of them, as attaching to them causes suffering, just like any
form of attachment. The business of ecstatic experiences is not
Buddhist, but the Buddhist business is the letting go of all experience,
including that letting go. It is this factor that ends suffering, or at
least alleviates it. If you can do the letting go, you don't need the
ecstatic experiences, and if you can't, they are downright dangerous,
and you had better avoid them altogether. If you get hooked, you can
get hooked for life, without appeal.

This wholesale abandonment leaves room for a non-situated, unlocalised,
homeless perspective that has no mooring and no reference. It is a
global perception that takes in all that happens (including the
ecstatic/instatic elements) without paying special, preferential
attention to any of them. It floats free.

But don't pay attention, I am only babbling and am talking about what
I don't know. My imagination gets the better of me.

Colophon

Posted to talk.religion.buddhism on 4 March 2008, in the thread "unperspectivisms (was Re: Jews & Buddhists)," in reply to ^@%>---=# arguing that "unperspectivised" non-local awareness transcends ordinary perspectival consciousness. Author: Tang Huyen. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.*

A crisp taxonomy of Buddhist meditative experience and its limits. TH distinguishes between the states (four form jhānas, four formless attainments, four Divine Abodes) and what Buddhism actually aims at — not the states, but the letting go of them. The argument has a recursive edge: even the letting go must be let go. What remains is not another experience but the absence of preferential focus — a perspective without a position, homeless and unlocalised. The self-deprecating closing ("I am only babbling") is a characteristic TH gesture, undercutting the claim even as it is made.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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