The argument from religious experience in Hinduism

Hinduism, or more precisely the yogic and Vedantic traditions within it, has produced the most sophisticated literature on religious experience of any tradition. The Upanishads are largely records of contemplative claims; Patanjali's Yoga Sutras codify a staged path to samadhi; Shankara's Advaita Vedanta treats the direct apprehension of non-dual Brahman as the decisive validation of its metaphysics. The argument from religious experience here is not an inference from isolated mystical reports but a full methodology: a practitioner can, through specific disciplines, come to know the ultimate nature of reality directly.

Different Hindu schools interpret these experiences differently. Advaita Vedanta takes the reports as confirming non-dualism: the self and the absolute are one. Visishtadvaita interprets similar phenomenology as theistic communion — real relationship between distinct realities. Dvaita draws a sharper line still. That the same reported experiences can be read in incompatible ways is both the tradition's internal problem and its philosophical interest: religious experience is not metaphysically self-interpreting.

Western engagement ran from William James (who drew heavily on Hindu and Buddhist material in Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902) through Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy, 1945) to contemporary comparative mysticism. The standard skeptical reply — that neurologically similar experiences can be induced by meditation, drugs, hypoxia, or temporal-lobe epilepsy — applies here as everywhere. But Hindu defenders answer, as Buddhists do, that the relevant data are not the bare feelings but the accompanying cognitive transformations, which can be diagnostically tested against tradition-internal criteria. Whether those criteria themselves survive critical scrutiny is the live question.