An Experience, or an Interpretation of One

A central and unresolved debate within the academic study of religious experience concerns whether mystical experiences across different traditions share a genuine common core that each tradition subsequently interprets through its own theological vocabulary, a view associated with earlier scholars of comparative mysticism and sometimes called perennialism, or whether the experience itself is already shaped, from the start, by the concepts, expectations and training a specific tradition supplies, so that there is no pre-interpretive experiential core to compare across traditions at all.

The philosopher Steven Katz argued forcefully for this second, constructivist position in influential essays from the late 1970s onward, holding that a Buddhist meditator's and a Christian contemplative's reported experiences differ in ways too deep to be explained as the same underlying event dressed in different theological language, since the concepts each brings to the experience shape what is experienced rather than being applied only afterward to describe it. Perennialist scholars have responded that constructivism understates genuine cross-traditional similarities documented across independent first person accounts, including the four marks James identified, similarities constructivists attribute instead to broadly shared features of human cognition and language rather than to one common mystical object being differently described. This atlas records both positions as live and contested within religious studies rather than favoring either.