To put it simply, mysticism is the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment – or “union with God,” or any of the other names that religions give to that incomparable experience and realization.[1] At the intellectual level, mysticism holds that everything in the world is a manifestation of the divine, and at the practical level, it helps people to realize their own ultimate oneness with the divine and with all things, which enables people to transcend mundane life and its suffering. Mysticism is the highest, purest form of spirituality.
Since all religions teach that the pursuit of enlightenment is the meaning of life, they exist to facilitate the mystical quest. They’re the means that the divine uses to bring us back to itself from our current state of fragmentation, corruption, and forgetfulness. Thus, mysticism is the ultimate purpose and inner meaning of more or less everything in more or less every religion. As the anonymous medieval Christian mystical treatise The Cloud of Unknowing states, “God is always eager to work in the heart of one who has done all he can to prepare the way for his grace,”[2] and so, as the famous Sufi (Islamic mystic) poet Rumi adds, “when our religion resides in a person’s heart, it stays right there until it takes his heart to God and separates it from everything unworthy.”[3] We’ll see lots of examples of this throughout this article.
The Worldview of Mysticism
Each of the world’s religions teaches its own version of a mystical worldview in which all that exists, exists only through its participation in the divine’s existence. This means that, when it really comes down to it, the divine is the only thing that truly exists. The divine is infinite and transcends everything, even the very concept of “existence,” but the divine’s infinite nature also means that nothing can truly exist apart from the divine. This view is called monism or non-dualism. That linked article contains a veritable mountain of examples of monistic or non-dualistic teachings from numerous religions, so let’s just consider a very few examples here.
The Upanishads, which are a set of some of the most important sacred texts from Hinduism, call the divine the “Self” (Sanskrit Atman) of all things. For example, the Isha Upanishad states,
The Self is one….
Without the Self, never could life exist….
He is within all, and he transcends all.[4]
Buddhism teaches that what we normally call the “self” is an illusion, and that we are instead something that can’t be described at all, or at best can be provisionally described as something like “Buddha-nature” (Sanskrit tathagatagarbha), as in the following passage from the Mahaparinirvana-mahasutra:
What is called ‘the self’ means the tathagatagarbha.
The nature of the Buddha exists in every sentient being,
but because it is obscured by all manner of afflictions,
sentient beings cannot see, within themselves, its presence.[5]
The Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, proclaims: “The East and the West belong to God: wherever you turn, there is His Face. God is all pervading and all knowing.”[6]
The Hebrew Bible, the holiest of Jewish scriptures, and which Christianity also reveres as the “Old Testament,” says of God in the book of Isaiah: “the whole earth is full of his glory.”[7]
The Christian “New Testament” concurs: according to the book of Romans, “from him and through him and to him are all things,”[8] and according to the book of Acts, “in him we live and move and have our being.”[9]
Mysticism places great weight on such teachings, because when the world is seen in light of them, everything else in mysticism follows from them. If the divine, the highest good out there, is within all things yet hidden from our ordinary perception of them, then the best thing that one could do with one’s life must be to find that “Hidden Treasure” in oneself and all around oneself, as a saying from Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, puts it.[10] Thus, the Buddhist Angulimaliyasutra says:
Furthermore, Manjusri, someone who knows there to be butter in milk will diligently churn it, but because it has no butter will not churn water; likewise, Manjusri, because sentient beings know [themselves] to have the tathagatagarbha, they keep observation of the precepts and practice celibacy. And furthermore, Manjusri, someone who knows there to be gold in a mountain will dig to find gold, but because it has no gold will not dig into a tree; likewise, Manjusri, because sentient beings know [themselves] to have the tathagatagarbha, they keep observation of the precepts and practice celibacy, declaring: “I shall certainly attain awakening!”[11]
The Book of Privy Counseling, a medieval Christian mystical text by the same anonymous author who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing, says the same thing in Christian terms:
But now I want you to understand that although in the beginning I told you to forget everything save the blind awareness of your naked being, I intended all along to lead you eventually to the point where you would forget even this, so as to experience only the being of God. It was with an eye to this ultimate experience that I said in the beginning: God is your being.[12]
And Black Elk, a medicine man of the Lakota Sioux tribe of the Great Plains of North America, likewise articulates the mystical purpose of a monistic or non-dualistic worldview in his own people’s terms:
We should understand well that all things are the works of the Great Spirit. We should know that He is within all things: the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, and all the four-legged animals, and the winged peoples; and even more important, we should understand that He is also above all these things and peoples. When we do understand all this deeply in our hearts, then we will fear, and love, and know the Great Spirit, and then we will be and act and live as He intends.[13]
What, then, does it mean to live as the divine intends? Let’s now turn from the intellectual part of mysticism to the practical part of it.
The Annihilation and Completion of the Self
Although the divine is the innermost self of all things, including our own selves, that mystical understanding isn’t how we perceive things on an everyday basis, of course. Instead, we go through most if not all of our lives as if our selves were limited to an individual body and mind stuck in a particular place and time and more or less helplessly enslaved to pleasure, pain, and ultimately death. For the sake of convenience, we can call that cramped, needy self the “ego.” How do we resolve this jarring discrepancy between the everyday ego and the true, underlying self of which mysticism speaks?
The great mystical traditions answer that in order to realize our true self, our egos have to be dissolved into that deeper self. They must cease to exist as separate, limited, deluded entities. Even though, at bottom, they’re part of the true, divine self all the time, a radical transformation has to occur within us in order for us to come to know the truth of that mystical claim.
Sufism, Islam’s tradition of mysticism, calls this transformation by a double name: “annihilation” (Arabic fana’) and “subsistence” (baqa’).[14] The ego must be annihilated so that one’s true subsistence in God can be revealed. This is what the Sufis take to be one of the meanings of a passage from the fifty-fifth surah (chapter) of the Qur’an: “All that dwells on the earth is annihilated, and there subsists only the face of your Lord, the possessor of majesty and generosity.”[15]
These Islamic mystics also see this “annihilation” and “subsistence” in the Shahadah, the basic profession of faith in Islam. The first part of that declaration says, “There is no god but God” (La ilaha illa’Llah). The phrase “no god” is often known as the “negation” (nafy), while the phrase “but God” is called the “affirmation” (ithbat). In “annihilation,” the self experiences the “negation:” inasmuch as it tries to be separate from God, effectively another self-sufficient god, it is nothing. But in “subsistence,” the self experiences the “affirmation:” inasmuch as it understands that it is nothing but God, it is eternal life and certain reality.[16]
Rumi, one of the most celebrated Sufis, expresses this mystical insight in a poem that also brings in another verse from the Qur’an, surah 28, verse 88: “Everything will perish except His Face.”[17]
“All things perish, except His Face:” Since you are not in His Face, seek not to exist:
“All things perish” no longer applies to him who is annihilated in Our Face,
For he is in “but God,” he has passed beyond “no god;” whoever is in “but” has not been annihilated.[18]
Another Sufi poet, Hafez, articulates the same mystical transformation in very different words:
Come, and ensure Hafez’s being
Will disappear –
Since You exist, no one will hear
Me say, “I’m here.”[19]
What Islamic mysticism calls simultaneous “annihilation” and “subsistence” can be found in the mysticism of many other religions, too – and sometimes even the same words. For example, Saint John of the Cross, one of the great Christian mystics, writes,
I should like to persuade spiritual persons that the road leading to God… demands only the one thing necessary: true self-denial, exterior and interior, through surrender of self both to suffering for Christ and to annihilation in all things. In the exercise of this self-denial everything else, and even more, is discovered and accomplished.[20]
This can’t help but remind the reader well-versed in Christianity of a certain famous passage in the Gospel According to Saint Mark, the mystical significance of which should need no further elaboration by this point:
He [Jesus] called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?”[21]
Likewise, another Catholic saint and mystic, Teresa of Avila, writes: “For it is quite certain that, when we empty ourselves of all that is creature and rid ourselves of it for the love of God, that same Lord will fill our souls with Himself.”[22]
And to cite just one further example of this mystical annihilation of the ego (or of the illusion of the ego) and subsistence in the divine, Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, has found this same meaning in Genesis 5:24: “And Enoch journeyed with God, and he was not, for God took him.”[23]
Detachment and Non-Action
In order to foster this simultaneous “annihilation” and “subsistence,” mystics of all religions practice detachment from their egoistic cravings for any and all worldly things. Since those attachments are based on the deluded view that the ego is the true self, they have to be let go of in order for the mystic to see reality as it is. As Saint John of the Cross explains,
All creatures of heaven and earth are nothing when compared to God… All creatures considered in this way are nothing, and a person’s attachments to them are less than nothing since these attachments are an impediment to and deprive the soul of transformation in God – just as darkness is nothing and less than nothing since it is a privation of light. One who is in darkness does not comprehend the light, so neither will a person attached to creatures be able to comprehend God.[24]
Such detachment is the only fitting response to how fleeting and ultimately unsatisfying the things of this world are, anyway. Thus Attar, one of the classic Sufi poets, writes,
You cannot even keep your own life,
what makes you think you can hold on
to money, property, this or that?
Abandon everything, even your life if you must.[25]
Or as Yunus Emre, another luminary of Islamic mysticism, pithily puts it,
Whatever separates you from the Truth,
throw it away, it will vanish anyhow.[26]
When the mystic empties himself or herself of worldly attachments, he or she opens up space that can be filled by the divine. Taoism, one of the main traditional religions of China, has a name for such a state of being: wu wei, which literally means “non-action.” But this “non-action” doesn’t mean sitting around and doing nothing all the time. Instead, it means doing whatever the divine does through you and nothing else. The divine, and not your ego, directs your actions, whatever they may be.[27]
One of the main themes of the Tao Te Ching, the central sacred text of Taoism, is this inner harmony with the Tao (the Taoist word for the divine). To get a clearer sense of what wu wei is, we can therefore hardly do better than to just quote the Tao Te Ching itself:
[The] Tao abides in non-action,
Yet nothing is left undone.[28]
Only in being lived by the Tao
can you be truly yourself.[29]
The Master stays behind;
that is why she is ahead.
She is detached from all things;
that is why she is one with them.
Because she has let go of herself,
she is perfectly fulfilled.[30]
More or less the same concept can be found in the mysticism of more or less all other religions, too, even though they don’t use the term wu wei. For example, the medieval Christian mystic Meister Eckhart writes in one of his sermons, “the very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within.”[31] Or in Rumi’s words,
Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it.
Be a spot of ground where nothing is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.[32]
Meditation or Contemplation
If that positive emptiness is the general lifestyle that mysticism recommends, how, specifically, do mystics go about cultivating it?
Virtually everything in religion points toward mysticism and spiritual enlightenment in some way or another, however directly or indirectly. Worship and devotional love of the divine lead to a loss of self in the divine if such practices are taken to their logical conclusions. Consciously imitating the mythical actions of a god or goddess helps to unify the imitator with That which he or she imitates. Morality, by having the religious person “love others as oneself,” facilitates the realization of the oneness of all things. Even the most crassly selfish magical practices from religions help the practitioner to get closer to the divine than he or she would be if he or she instead took a secular, materialistic approach to solving his or her mundane problems. So a big part of the practice of mysticism is simply being religious or spiritual in a fairly ordinary sense.
But there’s also a set of spiritual practices that are specifically mystical, and which form the centerpiece of the practice of mysticism. This set of practices is often called “contemplative spirituality” or simply “contemplation.” In this context, “contemplation” doesn’t mean actively thinking about something, but instead more or less the opposite: going out of your way to not think about anything, so that your mind can instead be filled with the simple awareness of divine presence within you and around you. (That’s the original meaning of the word “contemplation,” and it’s highly unfortunate that the word has largely come to refer to mundane and ordinary thinking today.) “Contemplation” in mysticism is thus basically a synonym for “meditation” in the most spiritual sense of the word (rather than, say, the pop psychology sense of the word).
What these many techniques of meditation or contemplation have in common is that the mind is emptied of all of its usual contents and concentrated entirely on one focal point that tradition has shown to be particularly useful in opening you up to the divine. As Hinduism’s Katha Upanishad says,
Brahman, the hidden Self in everyone,
…is revealed only
To those who keep their minds one-pointed
On the Lord of Love and thus develop
A superconscious manner of knowing.[33]
And as the seventh-century Christian mystic John Climacus writes, “the demons fear concentration as thieves fear dogs.”[34]
Perhaps the most common focal point of these mystical forms of meditation is simply a name for the divine, or a short phrase or sentence that contains it. By repeating one of the names of the divine, whether silently or out loud, the mystic draws closer to the reality that the name symbolizes. In Islamic mysticism, this is called dhikr, “remembrance,”[35] and in the mysticism of Hinduism and other Indian religions, it’s called japa, “invocation.”[36]
Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, recommends the same technique, such as in Shaarei Kedushah by Chaim Vital:
One should place the four-lettered name of God [YHWH] continuously before one’s eyes, take care to clear one’s mind from all this-worldly vanities and attach oneself to the love of God, may He be blessed, with great desire.[37]
This exercise is one of the deeper meanings that Jewish mystics find in Psalm 16:8: “I keep the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.”[38]
Christian mysticism, too, knows the same technique, where it’s often called “contemplative prayer.” The Cloud of Unknowing contains some classic articulations and explanations of this technique in a Christian context, such as in the following passage:
If you want to gather all your desire into one simple word that the mind can easily retain, choose a short word rather than a long one. A one-syllable word such as “God” or “love” is best. But choose one that is meaningful to you. Then fix it in your mind so that it will remain there come what may. This word will be your defense in conflict and in peace. Use it to beat upon the cloud of darkness above you [between you and God] and to subdue all distractions, consigning them to the cloud of forgetting beneath you. Should some thought go on annoying you demanding to know what you are doing, answer with this one word alone. If your mind begins to intellectualize over the meaning and connotations of this little word, remind yourself that its value lies in its simplicity. Do this and I assure you these thoughts will vanish. Why? Because you have refused to develop them with arguing.[39]
Saint Teresa of Avila explains why this contemplative or meditative approach to prayer is the essence of all prayer, not just some strange, aberrant form of it:
As far as I can understand, the door of entry into this castle [of mystical union with God] is prayer and meditation: I do not say mental prayer rather than vocal, for, if it is prayer at all, it must be accompanied by meditation. If a person does not think Whom he is addressing, and what he is asking for, and who it is that is asking and of Whom he is asking it, I do not consider that he is praying at all even though he be constantly moving his lips. True, it is sometimes possible to pray without paying heed to these things, but that is only because they have been thought about previously; if a man is in the habit of speaking to God’s Majesty as he would speak to his slave, and never wonders if he is expressing himself properly, but merely utters the words that come to his lips because he has learned them by heart through constant repetition, I do not call that prayer at all – and God grant no Christian may ever speak to Him so![40]
A common variant of this technique of mysticism is concentrating on a mental image of the divine rather than a word. This pictorial version of contemplative prayer or meditation is particularly well-developed in the Tantric approaches to Buddhism and Hinduism, such as Tibetan Buddhism.[41] Shamanism, a type of magical practice that relies heavily on mental imagery and is common to virtually all tribal religions, grades into this version of mystical prayer at its “higher” levels.[42]
Countless more techniques of meditation or contemplation could be cited – the many extraordinary and nuanced types of Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist meditation, or neti-neti meditation in Hinduism, or hesychasm in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, for example. But hopefully these few examples illustrate the general nature of contemplative or meditative techniques in mysticism.
Conclusion: The Relationship Between Mysticism and Religion
There’s a fairly widespread misconception that religion and mysticism are enemies of each other rather than two sides of the same coin. Such a view is most commonly expressed by the more puritanical or fundamentalist followers of religion, who want to rid their religion of mysticism in a self-defeating attempt to “purify” it. But you can also hear such a view expressed by certain people among those who practice their spirituality outside of religion: they want to rid mysticism of religion in a self-defeating attempt to purify it.
Everything we’ve seen so far in this article should be enough to demonstrate how wrong such views are. But we can go further.
On the one hand, since mysticism is the purpose of everything in religion – and, as religions universally agree, the purpose of life itself – to attempt to rid religion of mysticism is like trying to rid the ocean of water. All it does is hollow out religion and remove the entire justification for being religious in the first place. It turns religion into the arbitrary system of dry, oppressive rules that anti-religious people mistakenly think all religions inherently are, which, in the long run, only turns that many more people against religion. Indeed, the modern world is so secular in large part because of the sixteenth-century Reformation’s attempt to cut out the mystical heart of Christianity.[43]
But there is a grain of truth behind the fundamentalist criticism that mysticism is subversive of religion: paradoxically, even though mysticism provides the only ultimately sound justification for religion, it also transcends religion. Religion is a means to the end of mystical experiences, not the other way around, so mysticism does treat religion as something that, in the end, must be left behind. When you reach the divine, all human words, concepts, beliefs, and practices fail to do justice to that ineffable Mystery, so it’s spiritually counterproductive to be overly attached to them. There’s a time and a place to hold onto them firmly, and a time and a place to drop them.
The Buddha expressed this point with his famous parable of the raft: religions are rafts to take you to the other side of a river, and when you’re standing on the far shore, the raft is no longer needed. You’ve made it to the point that the raft was there to help you reach. At that point, continuing to treat any religion as absolutely binding is like hoisting your raft onto your shoulders and carrying it around on land. Only the divine itself is truly absolute; religions are “just” various relative means of reaching the divine.[44]
The Sufis are famous for making the same point in language that’s deliberately shocking to those among their fellow Muslims whose conventional piety outstrips their spiritual insight. For example, Hafez once wrote, in seemingly flagrant defiance of the rules of Islam (such as not drinking alcohol and keeping your prayer mat clean),
And if the wine-seller [God] says wine
Should dye your prayer-mat. . . dye it!
Pilgrims should know each stage’s rule
And seek to satisfy it.[45]
Those who idolize their religion as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end are therefore right to feel threatened by mysticism, because it shows their idolatry for what it is. This is therefore where the anti-religious champions of mysticism have a grain of truth to their views as well.
But when religion is properly understood, it’s a first-rate means to the end of enlightenment. Even those who practice mysticism outside of the formal structures of religion – and since mysticism transcends religion, there’s nothing at all wrong with that in and of itself – are still reliant on beliefs and practices gleaned from religions in order to have their own version of the Buddha’s raft.
Indeed, after telling his parable of the raft, the Buddha hastened to add: “when you know the [teachings] to be similar to a raft, you should abandon even the teachings, how much more so things contrary to the teachings.”[46] Some kind of raft is necessary to reach the other side, whether that raft comes ready-made from an established religion or if it’s one you’ve built yourself with materials obtained from various different sources. Religions are still an indispensable resource to draw from one way or another. So why not acknowledge that forthrightly and give religions the credit they’re due?
With so many possibilities for how to practice mysticism, we can ask with Rumi,
Why do you stay in prison
when the door is so wide open?[47]
References:
[1] Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 2007. The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition. HarperOne. p. 5.
[2] Johnston, William (transl.). 2014. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling. Image Books. p. 73.
[3] Chittick, William C. 1983. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. State University of New York Press, Albany. p. 215.
[4] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Isha Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 57.
[5] Jones, C.V. 2021. The Buddhist Self: On Tathagatagarbha and Atman. University of Hawai’i Press. p. 1.
[6] Haleem, Abdel (transl.) 2005. The Qur’an. Oxford University Press. p. 14.
[7] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 988.
[8] Ibid. p. 1631.
[9] Ibid. p. 1591.
[10] Knysh, Alexander. 2024. Islam in Historical Perspective. Routledge. p. 123.
[11] Jones, C.V. 2021. The Buddhist Self: On Tathagatagarbha and Atman. University of Hawai’i Press. p. 83-84.
[12] Johnston, William (transl.). 2014. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling. Image Books. p. 159.
[13] Brown, Joseph Epes. 1989. The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. University of Oklahoma Press. p. xx.
[14] Chittick, William C. 1983. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. State University of New York Press, Albany. p. 179.
[15] Chittick, William C. 1994. Imaginal Worlds: Ibn al-‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity. State University of New York Press, Albany. p. 59.
[16] Chittick, William C. 1983. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. State University of New York Press, Albany. p. 181.
[17] Haleem, Abdel (transl.) 2005. The Qur’an. Oxford University Press. p. 251.
[18] Chittick, William C. 1983. The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi. State University of New York Press, Albany. p. 182.
I’ve taken the liberty of putting the italicized text in the original quote into quotation marks instead, so that it looks better in this format. This doesn’t change the meaning of any part of the quote.
[19] Davis, Dick (transl.) 2013. Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. Penguin Books. p. 125.
[20] John of the Cross. 1991. The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross. Transl. Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez. Institute of Carmelite Studies. p. 171.
[21] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 1448.
[22] Teresa of Avila. 2007. The Interior Castle. Transl. E. Allison Peers. Dover Publications. p. 154.
[23] Unterman, Alan (transl.). 2008. The Kabbalistic Tradition: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism. Penguin Books. p. 73.
[24] John of the Cross. 1991. The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross. Transl. Kieran Kavanaugh & Otilio Rodriguez. Institute of Carmelite Studies. p. 124.
[25] Attar. 2018. The Conference of the Birds. Transl. Sholeh Wolpé. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 152-153.
[26] Helminski, Kabir, and Refik Algan (transl.). 1989. The Drop that Became the Sea: Lyric Poems of Yunus Emre. Threshold Books. p. 83.
[27] Poceski, Mario. 2009. Introducing Chinese Religions. Routledge. p. 66.
[28] Lao Tzu. 1989. Tao Te Ching. Transl. Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English. Vintage Books. p. 39.
[29] Lao Tzu. 1988. Tao Te Ching. Transl. Stephen Mitchell. HarperCollins. p. 22.
[30] Ibid. p. 7.
[31] Walshe, Maurice O’C. (transl.). 2009. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. The Crossroad Publishing Company. p. 33.
[32] Barks, Coleman (transl.). 1997. The Essential Rumi. Castle Books. p. 15.
[33] Easwaran, Eknath (transl.). 2007. “Katha Upanishad.” In The Upanishads. Nilgiri Press. p. 82.
[34] John Climacus. 1959. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Transl. Archimandrite Lazarus Moore. Harper & Brothers. p. 115.
[35] Murata, Sachiko, and William C. Chittick. 1994. The Vision of Islam. Paragon House. p. 338.
[36] Pallis, Marco. 2008. The Way and the Mountain: Tibet, Buddhism, and Tradition. World Wisdom. p. 124.
[37] Unterman, Alan (transl.). 2008. The Kabbalistic Tradition: An Anthology of Jewish Mysticism. Penguin Books. p. 16.
[38] Coogan, Michael D., et al (eds.). 2018. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Oxford University Press. p. 793.
[39] Johnston, William (transl.). 2014. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling. Image Books. p. 48.
[40] Teresa of Avila. 2007. The Interior Castle. Transl. E. Allison Peers. Dover Publications. p. 18.
[41] Samuel, Geoffrey. 2012. Introducing Tibetan Buddhism. Routledge. p. 70-71.
[42] Wilby, Emma. 2010. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanistic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic. Sussex Academic Press. p. 237-242.
[43] Eire, Carlos M.N. 2016. Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650. Yale University Press.
[44] Bhikkhu Nanamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi (transl.). 1995. The Middle-Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Buddhist Publication Society. p. 228-229.
[45] Davis, Dick (transl.) 2013. Faces of Love: Hafez and the Poets of Shiraz. Penguin Books. p. 10.
[46] Bhikkhu Nanamoli & Bhikkhu Bodhi (transl.). 1995. The Middle-Length Discourses of the Buddha: A New Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya. Buddhist Publication Society. p. 228-229.
[47] Barks, Coleman (transl.). 1997. The Essential Rumi. Castle Books. p. 3.