Spiritualities separated at birth or accidentally related? The 'spiritual senses' traditions in Eastern Orthodox Hesychasm and Chan/Zen Buddhism

Abstract

Within the corpus of writings of The Philokalia, and in the broader Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition of Hesychasm, there is a traditional teaching that argues that it is possible that one can see, hear, smell, taste and even touch God with certain 'spiritual senses' (often seen as ‘senses of the Mind’). In early Chinese Chan Buddhism (the predecessor to Japanese Zen), in turn, there is a distinction made between ‘pure mind’ and the ‘impure mind.' The impure mind is ruled by the ‘six thieves’ of the sense faculties that lead to becoming attached to myriad objects and forming evil deeds. This blocks off one from seeing true Suchness and Awakening to reality, which is the path of liberation to one's Buddha nature with ‘purified’ senses of the pure mind. We shall argue that these two traditions are at one in terms of seeing their respective spiritual senses as the fruit of the transformed deified/enlightened life, the crown of the saints/bodhisattvas. However, the underlying vision of the cosmos and soteriological thrust of the spiritual senses is so radically different in both traditions, that one must ultimately say the two forms of spiritual senses are “false friends” or only roughly analogous.