If you are implying
japanese zen monk ,
then that maybe true, but ,
if it includes other than that ,
I don’t think so . There were
real bhikkhus in China mainland
whom were still practicing zen !
They believes that zen teachings
was transmitted from Gotama .
This is exactly the point. We are talking about Samma Samadhi.
We used to have quite a few growing in the fields in England as well. Only in fields that had not been plowed or fertilized for many years.
I took psilocybin once and that was fun for a day or so, but I certainly would not classify it as anything coming close to meditation-experiences. It does not lead to any wisdom, only to attachment. The main effect for me came afterwards, when I became extremely depressed for 2 weeks without any reason. I swore never to have psilocybin again.
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My own experience with mushrooms was the following:
One of my fellow dwellers in our students’ shared flat ate half of a big fly agaric in order to try out its psychodelic effect.
After some time she started feeling unwell and told us what she had done. At the same time she refused to see the doctor which we of course recommended. She lay down in her bed and fell asleep, and the rest of us would take turns the whole night to watch over her heart rate and breath…
She was still alive the next morning, well rested and recovered from the mushroom sickness; and we others were all completely exhausted from the sleepless night and the worry!
No flying through the air as the name promises, nor any other interesting phenomena. So as a scientific experiment this was pretty disappointing! 
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Fly Agaric is very poisonous and only a hallucinatic in very small amounts. This article is about a very different mushroom, psilocybin.
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This post makes an interesting juxtaposition with the post on iconoclastic modernist teachers like Trungpa, because they both point to the phenomenon of “hippy, trippy Buddhism” that had had such an strong impact on the Western encounter with Buddhism in the 50s, 60s and 70s. That generation seems to be passing from the scene now, and it is interesting to think about the various things that are replacing it.
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I find it so very strange when people claim the 5th precept to be abstaining from all intoxicants and drugs. Is this not simply a false idea? The precept only mentions alcohol, right?
Now @Sujato I would be very interested in what you think about my translation of the 5th precept. It implies a different understanding of the grammar than the one usually given, but it seems to me to be at least as in line if not more in line with the Pāli of the sentence:
'I undertake the training rule to abstain from the condition of heedlessness caused by alcoholic drinks.’
That would therefore not be a rule to abstain from the alcohol itself necessarily, but to abstain from the heedlessness. Naturally for many or most people that will require anstaining from alcohol (or excessive amounts of alcohol) but does not rule out drinking - which is why this interpretation may cause anger in people who have a lot of emotoinal atachment to the usual understanding. But I hope this to be judged on grammar.
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I don’t think one experience is enough to give a balanced judgement. It can lead to great wisdom. Depends on dosage, and circumstances (both internal and external). There have also been some wonderful results using psilocybin in treating mental health issues, such as chronic depression. And MDMA has been found to be very helpful also, for example with PTSD. There should be good ways for these to be integrated with the Buddhist world also. If people are willing to research nd develop things!
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Surprising the degree of relatively un-informed opinion here on this subject.
Here’s some anecdotal input (not without some theory):
Late 1960’s, attending University of Calif., Berkeley, I and several other graduate students used hallucinogenic substances in a rather structured way – weekend evening meal, maybe with some marijuana for starters, then, after dinner, small to moderate dose of some thing like mescalin or LSD (psilocybin is a bit more exotic to acquire, but reports from those familiar with it were that it’s in the same ballpark with peyote and LSD) . Then an evening (usually well-into the night) of listening to and discussing music (we were all in the music-history department). Quite productive. At least one notable PhD dissertation came out of that group and the things discovered with some help from ASCs (altered states of consciousness).
Stories about bad experiences, especially afterwards… The thing is treating the whole matter with respect and skill. No one I knew went into such experience without, initially a “guide” – someone a) personally trusted, and b) experienced, also having been guided / trained. What happens during, and after is a function of what’s already in the person’s psyche, how stable and open-minded they are going in; it can’t be blamed on the substance (referring to the common hallucinogens, not hard narcotics, amphetamines, or other exotic chemical concoctions).
Aspects of such experience are clearly comparable to aspects of (hard) jhana. (This is not equating them, please note.) For one thing, the mind gets to experience a shifted perspective, a kind of awareness radically different than every-day conditioned worldly consciousness. This can help one recognize how fabricated our conditioned “reality” can be. Particularly at about graduate-student age (early 20s), one can get a glimpse of one’s conditioning which one has just worked hard at for ca. 16 years of “education”, and of the possibility of it’s being modified. Compare the tradition in some cultures for a young graduate to go live abroad for some time (e.g., I believe in some European upper-class traditions). Experiencing how other people live, think, work, dream etc. in a different culture, different language, etc., one can see how, in a sense, one’s own culture is also “other”. That’s called education – “e-” (ex- out of) “-ducation” (being led).
About the same time, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was teaching in the San Fransisco area for half a year. His attitude was to recognize, but discourage using a drug. He said one can achieve the same with good training and hard, concentrated work (e.g. that of composing and performing music); and then it’s an authentic skill (you own it). (Listen to Stockhausen’s music, or see him lecture in youtube videos – the dude was concentrated!) The use of a substance can help one realize that there’s something possible not previously recognized, which then can be authentically cultivated.
With such things, wallowing in it, or addiction, attachment, etc. – are more functions of the person’s own state of mind and training (or lack thereof) than inherent in the substances themselves.
I believe those experiences played a role, next to long cultivated experience with music itself, in developing skill in concentration, and, some 40 years later, being more inclined towards appana-samadhi (i.e. a samadhiyanika). (The kind of enhanced concentration as in some hallucinogenic and musical experiences is more of the khanikha-samadhi sort; not, though, vipassana-khanikha-samadhi, which is a highly advanced training.)
Bit more: playing with such mind-alteration earlier (adolescence) is ill-advised as the mind is still being conditioned (to carry-out normal social-cultural roles). Too much “tripping” damages that. Also, with longer life-experience, forced mind-altering is less attractive; healthy people naturally give it up after that period of youthful experimentation.
Also, there’s the famous, perhaps apocryphal, story where the Beatles (mid-20th-century pop-music group) went to their (old) guru in India and gave him LSD or something, with high expectations; the guru took it, just sat there, eventually remarking something like “So What?” (nothing new to his mental powers).
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I’m sure those vibes will kick in any minute now. 
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Well, like many people of my age (I’m 57 now), I also experimented with hallucinogens a bit during my college years. The experiences were very interesting, for sure, although they are now so far in the past for me that I can’t recall them with any real accuracy. (They were always hard to describe and recall, anyway, no matter how much time had elapsed.) But, insofar as I can recall the nature of the experiences and the peculiar value they possessed, I don’t see them as connected to the Buddha’s path, or the goal of that path, in any especially important way.
Hallucinogenic experiences may be exciting, they may be awesome, or they may be frightening depending on the conditions in which they occur, the user’s prior state of mind, or the qualities of the substance that is ingested. But they certainly don’t inherently involve any less dukkha than ordinary experiences. As I recall, the experiences were filled with just as much confusion, and just as many bewildering and disorienting ups and downs, as ordinary experience - probably even more. There might be a sense of liberation, since you are undergoing a form of experience that is radically different from your standard form of experience, and so that gives you an excited rush of being freed from the boundaries of your ordinary life. But those radical mental changes also bring with them the bewilderment and anxieties of being in a new “place”, so to speak, that you don’t quite understand, and where your ordinary intellectual processing doesn’t work so well.
The “bliss of liberation” that is supposed to accompany nibbana, on the other hand, at least as I understand it, is a state of absolute peace, blissful serenity and perfect equanimity. The Buddha never describes it as filled with multicolored and multi-limbed deities, fantastic visual magic shows or celestial organ concertos. When the Buddha sat by the Neranjana enjoying that state, I don’t think he was tripping out. Rather his mind was totally still and at rest.
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Different priorities of immorality are evident in different cultures. In the east a monk doing drugs would be as bad as a school teacher who is a paedophile in the west…or running out of beer in Australia. 
Now imagine a paedophillic school teacher in the name of science. 
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Well articulated… no shortcuts. 
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Guess those Buddhists forgot to ask the lab scientists a simple question before taking the psychedelic pills: what do you guys really hope to get out of the experiment? manufacture, market, and sell some “instant enlightenment” pills, sort of like those instant-coffee powders, or instant-ramen noodles? Maybe one nice day, there’ll be TV commercials selling 1st-Jhana pills for $1000, 2nd-Jhana pills for $2000,… up to cessation-of-feeling-perception for $9000. Actually, for those who want to purchase the $9000 “cessation” pills, you might as well give them all your money 'cuz once you get to that level, that would guarantee Arahantship, or at least Non-Return!
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I guess if I thought there really was a pill that induced genuine nibbana, I couldn’t object to someone taking it. But I don’t see any reason to think that the psychedelic experiences induced by hallucinogens are anything like nibbana, as described by the Buddha. The only thing they have in common is that they are both “altered states.”
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Isn’t this the craving for Nibbana?
I agree with you, Dan. Even if a pill was offered, I wouldn’t take it. Something about following this path of practice, even if through eons of lifetimes, to reach that point. The Buddha had to take the long road, and why not the rest of us?
To add to your point, the quality of nibbana, the organic freedom, this cultivation of consciousness at the highest and freest level, is so complex as to be foreign and distinct from anything that could be put into a pill. One analogy that comes to mind is that there are some pills ( or LSD tabs, so I’ve heard) that allow a person to believe they can fly. But feeling as though you can fly, or even experiencing flight through a chemical simuation or VR , is not the same as actual flight. With VR or altered states, you don’t actually go anywhere. It seems to me that nibbana is holistically different from a sense of or absorption into a feeling of liberation from mundane states. It is liberation at the very cellular, spiritual, organic and supra-consciousness level.
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not true. other amanita mushrooms like death caps are but not these. psilocybin is actually more dangerous recreational drug because more likely to have bad experience and accidental death.
It’s funny to see how easily people persecute those guys, only because it’s “drugs”, not really thinking about the bigger picture - that such experiments expand our knowledge about workings of the brain.
Even if he was a Theravada Bhikkhu, there would be much more merit in his involvement in such experiment than in doing rituals, giving lottery numbers and thus perpetuating delusion in lay believers.
Two wrongs do not add up to one right!