While the word "religious experience" can have a number of different meanings it generally refers to special kinds of experiences that are outside the naturalistic world we are so used to living in. I have observed that some Western Buddhists are uncomfortable with labeling Buddhism as a religion because to their way of thinking the word connotes, in some measure, god of the Bible. Such a stance, however, is narrow-minded and emotion based. It refuses to allow the term "religious experience" to apply to Buddhism; keeping it as a Judeo-Christian term.
Buddhism without a religious experience, to my mind, is Buddhism that lacks any gravitas. It just becomes a matter of following a few basic rules and sitting in meditation. This is not only an overly simplistic understanding of Buddhism but it borders on being absurd given the obvious profundity of the Buddha's discourses taken as a whole—not selectively cherry picked.
That a religious experience can be of positive value, even changing the direction of one's life, should not be ignored or impugned. A religious experience can include a radical shift in a person's sense of agency. It can also overturn a person's long held presuppositions and beliefs about reality. Such an experience can be of a profound nature that it can permit one to see, first hand, the very stuff or essence of the universe which to this day science has been unable to do because of its bias towards the immaterial.
Beginning in 1965 my understanding of Buddhism and Zen Buddhism assumed that the Buddha's enlightenment was a religious experience including many of the Zen masters such as the Sixth Patriarch Hui=neng. This is what drew me to Zen which enabled me to find a wonderful home for my spirit in the Lankavatara Sutra. Speaking personally, I have had profound religious experiences. It is a fact that to say otherwise would be a lie. Such experiences permit me to say that Buddhism is a cosmic religion; that in the farthest galaxy away from ours, there are Buddhists. Those who disagree with me cannot even dream of what the Buddha was really teaching. Their opinions are merely a reflection of their ignorance of which they cannot bear to let go.
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