Buddhist insight meditation (Vipassana) and Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction: an example of dedifferentiation of religion and medicine?
For about 25 years, mindfulness meditation has attracted growing attention. Developed in the context of a traditional Asian religious tradition, mindfulness meditation originally served soteriological goals. In therapeutic settings, it has been claimed, it has become a secular consciousness technol...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
[2017]
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| In: |
Journal of contemporary religion
Year: 2017, Volume: 32, Issue: 3, Pages: 447-463 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Kabat-Zinn, Jon 1944-
/ Mindfulness-based stress reduction
/ Vipaśyanā
/ Religion
/ Medicine
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| Further subjects: | B
Medicine
B Buddhism B dedifferentiation B Healing B Mindfulness B mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) |
| Summary: | For about 25 years, mindfulness meditation has attracted growing attention. Developed in the context of a traditional Asian religious tradition, mindfulness meditation originally served soteriological goals. In therapeutic settings, it has been claimed, it has become a secular consciousness technology'. So far, studies have mainly been interested in clinical evidence for salutogenetic effects. Questions about if and how practices such as Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction (MBSR) are to be conceptualized as religious' still require further analysis. To provide a more fitting criteriology, we propose to distinguish between salvific' (liberating') and salvetive' (healing') settings of meditation, with the latter denoting a more therapeutic' outlook. It will be argued that MBSR bears elements of salvetive and salvific meditation. In the paradigm of a functional differentiation between religion' and biomedicine', MBSR's presence in biomedical institutions seems to provide a counter-example, which will be discussed in the final section. |
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| ISSN: | 1469-9419 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of contemporary religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/13537903.2017.1362884 |