Rethinking meditation: Buddhist practice in the ancient and modern worlds
A dizzying array of meditation practices have emerged in the long and culturally diverse history of Buddhism. Yet if you are seeking out meditation today in North America and Europe-and, increasingly, in the rest of the world as well-you will likely encounter one particular type, often under the lab...
| Summary: | A dizzying array of meditation practices have emerged in the long and culturally diverse history of Buddhism. Yet if you are seeking out meditation today in North America and Europe-and, increasingly, in the rest of the world as well-you will likely encounter one particular type, often under the label "mindfulness." You will find it taught in Zen monasteries, Insight Meditation centers, health clubs, colleges, psychologists' offices, corporations, liberal Christian churches, prisons, and the US military. Countless articles in popular magazines promote its benefits, often depicting it as a panacea for problems as wide-ranging as anxiety, depression, heart disease, eating disorders, and psoriasis. There are books on mindfulness and meditation not only by Buddhist monks but also by medical doctors, psychologists, computer engineers, business consultants, and a US congressman. Meditation teachers will sometimes say that this is the same meditative practice that the Buddha taught over 2500 years ago, and which has been transmitted virtually unchanged down through the centuries to us today. The "cultural baggage" surrounding the practices has changed, but the essence is intact, and what it does for people, whether you're a Buddhist monk or a corporate executive, remains the same.Rethinking Meditation shows that the standard articulation of mindfulness did not come down to us unchanged from the time of the Buddha. Rather, it is a distillation of particular strands of Buddhist thought that have combined with western ideas to create a unique practice tailored to modern life. Rethinking Meditation argues that the relationship between meditative practices and cultural context is much more crucial than is suggested in typical contemporary articulations.David McMahan shows that most of the vast array of meditative practices that have emerged in Buddhist traditions have been filtered out of typical contemporary practice, allowing only a trickle of meditative practices through. This book presents a genealogy of some specific elements in classical Buddhist traditions that have fed into contemporary meditative practices-those that have made it through the filters of modernity. It asks: out of the many forms of Buddhist meditation that have developed over two-and-a-half millennia, how and why were particular practices selected to coalesce into the Standard Version today? "Rethinking Meditation provides a new theoretical and historical approach to Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditative practices. It shows how, rather than coming down to us unchanged from the time of the Buddha, the standard articulation of mindfulness as bare, non-judgmental attention to the present moment is a distillation of particular strands of classical Buddhist thought that have combined with western ideas to create a unique practice tailored to modern forms of thought and ways of life. Part genealogical study and part philosophical argument, it inquires into some of the widespread assumptions about how meditation works and what it does, presenting a view of meditative practices as technologies of the self embedded in cultural forms of life. It shows that the relationship between meditative practices and cultural context is much more crucial than is suggested in typical contemporary articulations, which often emphasize transcendence of cultural conditioning and achieving "objective" internal access to the contents of consciousness. Meditation, McMahan argues, is always situated in social contexts and draws from repertoires of cultural categories, concepts, and values, sometimes accommodating them and sometimes resisting them. Rethinking Meditation also considers the scientific study of meditation and meditation in relation to modern articulations of secularism, freedom, authenticity, appreciation, and interdependence. It also examines the potential for meditation to enhance autonomy and addresses recent attempts to bring meditative practices to bear on social, political, and environmental issues"-- |
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| Item Description: | Includes bibliographical references and index |
| ISBN: | 0197661742 |