This issue of Mountain Record explores the mystical questions that are essential, not only to Zen practitioners, but to all spiritual seekers. It also looks at expressions of the mystical path in the world’s great religions. At their core, mystics, regardless of their religion, ask the same fundamental questions: What is this life? What is Truth? What is freedom? Who am I? What is God?

Although the language of Buddhism frames the question in terms of the nature of reality, Buddhists share the same heart of inquiry as Hindu, Jewish, Christian, and Sufi mystics. As Evelyn Underhill puts it, “The mystic is “In love with the Absolute”...[Mysticism] is essentially a movement of the heart, seeking to transcend the limitations of the individual standpoint and to surrender itself to ultimate Reality.”