Quick Answer
Otto took the two mystics most likely to be saying the same thing and read them line against line to find out. Eckhart in fourteenth-century Germany, Shankara in eighth-century India, no contact between them, and a startling amount of shared vocabulary about a ground beyond all attributes. His conclusion is the interesting part: the parallels are genuine and the two men still diverge, because one absolute moves and the other does not. The comparison is careful, the verdict leans Christian, and it started the argument Stace and Zaehner were still having thirty years later.
Key Takeaways
- Two mystics, read closely, rather than a hundred quoted in fragments.
- The parallels are real and Otto documents them properly.
- The divergence is the point: a living absolute against a motionless one.
- The verdict favours Eckhart, and Otto does not fully earn it.
- The method survived the conclusions, which is the usual fate of a good book.
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What This Book Is
West-östliche Mystik was published in German in 1926 and appeared in English as Mysticism East and West: A Comparative Analysis of the Nature of Mysticism. It runs a little over two hundred and fifty pages.
The structure is unusual and it is the reason the book matters. Otto takes two figures, Meister Eckhart and Shankara, and reads them against each other in detail: doctrine by doctrine, image by image, sometimes phrase by phrase.
This is not the anthology method that dominated comparative work then and dominates the popular literature now. Otto is not collecting resemblances from fifty sources. He is testing two bodies of writing against each other closely enough that a difference cannot hide.
The first half establishes how far the agreement runs. The second half argues that it stops, and says where.
On the translation. The standard English version is by Bertha Bracey and Richenda Payne, and it has been reprinted many times. It is competent and it flattens some of Otto's German, which is more energetic than the English suggests.
Who Rudolf Otto Was
Otto was born in Hanover in 1869 into a pious Lutheran family and trained as a theologian, teaching at Göttingen, Breslau and finally Marburg.
He was not a comparative religionist by formation. He came to the subject through travel, and the travel was consequential: journeys through North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, India, China and Japan in the years before the First World War, at a time when almost no European theologian had seen the religions they wrote about.
He described an experience in a synagogue in Morocco, hearing the Sanctus, that he treated afterwards as the moment his central idea arrived.
He also worked on Kant and on Jakob Fries, and the philosophical background matters, because his account of religious experience is shaped by a specific German epistemological tradition rather than assembled from the data.
He died in 1937 after a fall, in circumstances his biographers have never entirely settled.
What He Had Argued Before
The earlier book has to be in view, because this one is its test.
The Idea of the Holy, published in 1917, argued that religion has a core that is not moral and not rational: an encounter with something Otto called the numinous.
He described it with a Latin formula, mysterium tremendum et fascinans. A mystery that cannot be grasped, that produces dread and a sense of one's own nothingness, and that simultaneously attracts and holds.
The claim that made the book famous was that this cannot be reduced. It is not fear of nature, not projected authority, not ethics in disguise. It is a distinct category of experience with its own character.
The unfinished business, which this book takes up, is whether the numinous shows up in the same form everywhere, or whether it is a description of one religious tradition dressed as a universal.
Why These Two
The choice of subjects is the cleverest thing in the book.
If you want to test whether mystics across traditions agree, you need a case where agreement is most likely. A weak pairing proves nothing when it fails.
Eckhart and Shankara are the strongest case available. Both teach an absolute beyond all determination and beyond all attributes. Both hold that the deepest part of a person is not separate from that absolute. Both proceed by negation. Both were systematic thinkers rather than reporters of visions.
And there was no contact. Shankara wrote in the eighth century in India, Eckhart in the fourteenth in the Rhineland, with no plausible channel between them.
So any agreement is convergence rather than transmission, which is exactly the situation the common-core thesis needs and rarely gets.
Shankara in Brief
For readers who need the ground.
Shankara was the great systematiser of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual school of Indian philosophy, working through commentary on the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Brahma Sutras.
His central position: Brahman, the absolute, is one without a second, without qualities, without change. The world of multiplicity is not ultimately real in the way it appears. The individual self is not a part of Brahman or a creature of it; it is Brahman, and the appearance of separateness is ignorance.
Liberation is therefore not attainment. Nothing is acquired and nothing is transformed. What happens is that a misunderstanding ends, and what was always the case becomes evident.
The rigour of this is what attracted Otto. Shankara is not a devotional writer, and the position is worked out with philosophical care against opponents who are named and answered.
Eckhart in Brief
The other half of the comparison.
Meister Eckhart was a Dominican, a trained scholastic who held the chair at Paris twice, and a preacher in German to communities of nuns and lay people.
The material Otto works with is largely the German sermons, where Eckhart says things that got him tried for heresy at the end of his life: that there is something in the soul that is uncreated, that God and this ground are one, that a person should pray to be rid of God in order to reach what is beyond God.
His characteristic move is the distinction between God and Godhead. God is the absolute in relation to creatures, named and active. The Godhead is the absolute in itself, without relation, beyond the persons of the Trinity, described as a desert and a still wilderness.
The proximity to Shankara at this point is genuinely startling, and Otto's documentation of it is the best part of the book.
The Parallels
Otto sets them out systematically and the accumulation is what persuades.
Both hold that the absolute is beyond all predicates, so that every statement about it is finally false.
Both distinguish a higher and lower knowledge, with the higher not merely more information but a different mode entirely.
Both locate the point of contact inside the person rather than at a distance from them, and both use spatial imagery of depth and ground for it.
Both treat the ordinary self as the obstacle, and both describe its removal in language of poverty and emptiness rather than of achievement.
Both are hostile to religion understood as transaction, and both say sharp things about people who serve God for a reward.
What gives the comparison its force is that Otto is not matching moods. Anyone can find two mystics who sound exalted in similar ways. He is matching structural positions: what each says about the relation between the absolute and its appearances, about the status of the individual self, about what knowledge is and how it fails. Those are the places where a tradition's commitments show, and a match there is much harder to explain away than a match in tone.
The Way of Negation
The strand Otto pursues furthest, and the one where the two are closest.
Both writers proceed by stripping away. Every attribute proposed of the absolute is withdrawn, because any attribute would limit it, and what remains is described only in negative terms.
Shankara's formula is the well-known one from the Upanishads: not this, not this. Anything you can point to is not it.
Eckhart's is the desert, the still wilderness, the nothing that is beyond all being, and his willingness to say that God is not good, because goodness is a determination, is the kind of statement that attracted official attention.
Otto observes that this is not scepticism in either case. Neither writer concludes that nothing can be known. Both hold that the negation is itself a route, and that what cannot be said can be reached.
The Ground of the Soul
The second strand, and the more surprising convergence.
Both locate an element in the person that is not created, not part of the psychological self, and not different from the absolute.
Eckhart calls it variously the spark, the little castle, the ground, and insists that it is uncreated and uncreatable. Shankara's atman is the self that was never other than Brahman and never became so.
The consequence in both is the same and it is radical. If that is what a person most deeply is, then the goal is not union, because union implies two. It is recognition of what was never divided.
Otto notes that both men consequently have trouble with the language of their own traditions, which is built for a relation between a creature and a creator, and that both strain it in similar directions.
Where They Part
The second half of the book, and its real argument.
Having established the parallels as fully as he can, Otto turns and says the two are fundamentally different, and the difference is about movement.
Shankara's Brahman is without change. It does not act, does not become, does not go out of itself. The appearance of a world is not something Brahman does; multiplicity is a mistake made from below rather than an act performed from above.
Eckhart's Godhead is not still in that sense. There is a boiling and a birth in it, an inner life that overflows, and creation is an expression of that life rather than a misunderstanding of it. Eckhart's imagery is metabolic and generative where Shankara's is motionless.
The consequence Otto draws: for Shankara the world is finally to be seen through, and for Eckhart it is finally the outflow of something living. One position empties the world of significance and the other fills it.
This is a real difference and it is well documented, and it is the part of the book most worth having.
The Two Types of Mysticism
The typology Otto builds from the comparison, and it is worth noticing how much later work runs through it.
He distinguishes the mysticism of introspection, which turns inward and finds the absolute in the ground of the soul, from the mysticism of unifying vision, which looks outward and sees the many as one.
He argues that both appear in both traditions, that neither is Eastern or Western in any useful sense, and that the geographical division in his own title is therefore misleading.
Anyone who has read Stace will recognise this immediately. The introvertive and extrovertive types are Otto's distinction, tightened and given seven characteristics each, three decades later.
Stace credits him and the credit is rarely passed along, so the typology now circulates as Stace's with Otto's name detached from it.
The Verdict and Its Problem
Otto does not leave the two positions side by side. He ranks them, and this is where the book is weakest.
His conclusion is that Eckhart's is the fuller vision, because a living and creative absolute accounts for more than a motionless one, and because a world that flows from something is better than a world that is a mistake.
The trouble is visible as soon as it is stated. Otto is a Lutheran theologian who has compared a Christian and a Hindu and found the Christian more complete, and the criterion he uses, that the absolute should be living and creative, is a Christian criterion.
He is not crude about it. He grants Shankara enormous respect, concedes the rigour, and does not suggest the Indian tradition is primitive, which was more than most of his contemporaries managed.
He nonetheless arrives where his formation pointed, having used a standard the other party would reject. Shankara does not think a static absolute is a defect; he thinks change is what the absolute is free of, and being told this is a limitation is not an argument he would recognise.
The Objections
Three, made by scholars who came after.
Shankara through German glasses. Otto reads Advaita in categories drawn from idealist philosophy, and specialists have argued the fit is imposed. The technical apparatus of Shankara's arguments, and the tradition of debate he was working in, are largely invisible here.
Eckhart made safe. Otto's Eckhart is more orthodox than the historical record supports. The condemnation is treated as a misunderstanding, and the passages that most resist Christian framing get less weight than they might.
Two men are not two traditions. Even a perfect comparison of these two would establish something about Eckhart and Shankara. Both are unrepresentative of their traditions in exactly the ways that make them comparable, which is a selection effect running through the whole design.
What Came After
The book sits at the head of a line, and knowing the line is useful.
Otto establishes that close comparison is possible and finds real convergence with real limits. Stace in 1960 takes the typology, drops the theological ranking, and argues for a common core with differences assigned to interpretation. Zaehner in 1957 keeps a ranking of Otto's kind while multiplying the types and putting theism at the top.
Then the constructivists arrive in the 1970s and argue that the whole enterprise is malformed, because there is no experience underneath the descriptions to be compared.
What is striking in retrospect is that Otto's actual position, that the parallels are substantial and the differences are also substantial and neither cancels the other, is closer to where the field eventually settled than either of the men who followed him.
What the Method Is Worth
The durable contribution, separable from the conclusions.
Otto reads two writers closely enough that they can disagree with him. The anthology method cannot produce that: quotations selected for resemblance will resemble each other, and the person selecting never finds out they were wrong.
He also compares structural claims rather than reported feelings, which is the only comparison that can be checked. Two people saying an experience was overwhelming tells you nothing. Two people saying the self is not distinct from the absolute is a claim with content.
And he states his divergences at least as fully as his parallels, which is rare in this literature in both directions.
The Problem the Book Creates for Him
A tension Otto walks into and handles less completely than he thinks, and it is the most interesting difficulty in the book.
The numinous, as he had defined it in 1917, is relational. You stand before something overwhelming and are reduced by it. Dread and attraction both require a gap between the one who feels and what is felt.
The mysticism he examines here abolishes that gap. If the ground of the soul is the absolute, there is nobody left standing before anything, and the awe that was supposed to be the mark of religion has nothing to be awed at.
Otto sees the difficulty. His answer is that the numinous persists in transformed shape, that the moment of recognition carries its own version of the tremendum, and that both writers keep language of terror and abyss even at their least dualistic.
The evidence is decent. Eckhart's still wilderness is not a comfortable image, and the Upanishadic material has passages of genuine fright in it.
Whether that settles it is another matter. A category built for encounter has been stretched to cover the dissolution of encounter, and a reader is entitled to think the stretching has gone too far. It is the place where Otto's earlier theory shows its origin most plainly, in a Lutheran account of the creature before God.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are interested in Eckhart, since the reading is close and takes the difficult passages seriously rather than softening them.
Read it if you have absorbed the claim that all traditions teach the same thing and want to see somebody test it properly on the best available case.
Read it before Stace, because the typology everybody credits to Stace starts here and the argument is easier to follow in the order it was made.
Do not read it for Advaita. Go to Shankara directly or to a specialist, and come back to Otto knowing what he is working with.
The question Otto leaves open is the one worth carrying. Two people describe a reality beyond all description, both say the deepest thing in a person is not separate from it, and then one says that reality is motionless and the other says it is boiling over into a world. Is that a difference in what they found, or a difference in what their languages let them say about the same thing. Otto thought he could tell. Nobody since has shown that he could, and nobody has shown that he could not, which means the honest position is that a real convergence and a real divergence sit side by side and nobody has yet explained how.
Two mystics, eight centuries and five thousand miles apart, read line against line.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of where Otto's verdict follows his theology rather than his evidence is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Mysticism East and West about?
Rudolf Otto's 1926 comparison of Meister Eckhart and Shankara, examining how closely two mystics from unconnected traditions match each other and where they finally diverge.
Who was Rudolf Otto?
A German Lutheran theologian and scholar of religion, 1869 to 1937, best known for The Idea of the Holy and for introducing the term numinous into the study of religious experience.
Why Eckhart and Shankara?
Because they are the strongest possible test case. Both teach a non-dual absolute beyond attributes, both use similar language of ground and identity, and there was no historical contact between them.
What does he conclude?
That the parallels are real and substantial, and that the two men nonetheless differ fundamentally, because Eckhart's absolute is living and creative while Shankara's is static and without becoming.
What are the two types of mysticism he names?
The mysticism of introspection, which finds the absolute by turning inward to the ground of the soul, and the mysticism of unifying vision, which finds unity in the outward world of the many.
How does this relate to The Idea of the Holy?
It is the companion volume and the application. The earlier book established the numinous as the core of religious experience, and this one tests whether that core appears in the same shape across traditions.
Is Otto a perennialist?
Partly, and less than he is usually taken to be. He accepts deep structural parallels and insists that the differences are real rather than superficial, which puts him between the perennialists and their critics.
What is the main criticism?
That his reading of Shankara is filtered through German idealism, that he treats Eckhart as more orthodox than the record supports, and that his conclusion favours the Christian side of the comparison.
How difficult is it?
Moderately. Otto writes densely in the German scholarly manner and quotes Latin, German and Sanskrit, though the argument itself is clearly staged and the translation is readable.
Does it discuss the numinous?
Yes, and the treatment complicates the earlier book. Otto has to explain how a tradition centred on an impersonal absolute can produce the awe and dread he had described as the mark of the holy.
Is it still worth reading?
Yes, as the earliest serious attempt at close comparative reading of two mystics rather than anthology quotation, and as the model both Stace and Zaehner were working against.
Who should read it?
Readers interested in Eckhart, in Advaita Vedanta, or in whether cross-cultural comparison of mystical writing can be done rigorously rather than by assembling quotations.
Read two properly instead of fifty loosely
The standard way to encounter comparative mysticism is an anthology: a page of Rumi, a page of Eckhart, a page of the Upanishads, arranged so the resemblance does the work. It is a pleasant way to read and it cannot tell you anything, because the arrangement decided the result before you opened the book. Otto's alternative costs more and returns more. Take two writers, read both at length, and hold them against each other until they either agree in a way you can state or disagree in a way you can locate. You can do this with any two books on your shelf, and the first time you do it you will find out how much of what you believed about their agreement was supplied by whoever put them next to each other.
Sources & References
- Otto, Rudolf (1926). Mysticism East and West, trans. Bracey and Payne.
- Otto, R. The Idea of the Holy, the earlier account of the numinous.
- Meister Eckhart. The German sermons and the Latin works.
- Shankara. Commentaries on the Brahma Sutras and the Upanishads.
- Stace, W. T. Mysticism and Philosophy, which develops Otto's typology.
- Later scholarship on Advaita and on the reception of Eckhart.