Helen asked:

Buddhists (and other religions as well) say that the only real truth about reality derives from a
meditative experience that passes beyond concepts, language, and rationality whereas the whole
project of philosophy is of necessity bounded by language. Which is right path, meditation or reason?

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The idea of "meditative experience that passes beyond concepts, language, and rationality" is itself is
a statement. The modernist French philosopher Maurice Blanchot entitled one of his books, le pas
au-dela,translated as "the step beyond" but it is a play on words, because it also means "the not
beyond". The step beyond is always the not beyond. The step beyond language is always not beyond
language. There is no such thing as experience without language. The meditation posture, the lotus
position, like all bodily gestures, belongs to language which we understand. The very 'lotus'
metaphor, for instance, of a beautiful flower which grows out of the mud, is symbolic, as is the posture
itself. The silence and apatheia of meditation is deeply resonant, but only because it belongs to the
realm of language.

"Beyond rationality" is a statement that appeals to reason, so that you think, 'yes, I want that! I must
meditate.' Reasonable enough. Buddhism, like any religion, has its own rationale; Buddhism
especially. Meditation is not opposed to reason except if you hold (and then you would have to hold
tight) a narrow idea of both. If we take reason in the narrow sense of the rationalism of logical
positivists or strict empiricists, then almost the whole of the living world is out of gear with reason. But
if we take 'reason' in the proper, living sense that our language is always already reasonable, which
grammar has to be to make sense, and we have to be to understand each other, then the whole of
religion belongs to that sphere. The opposition of meditation to reason is a false dichotomy. I imagine
that neither can properly do without the other.

Matthew Del Nevo
www.sicetnon.com