“Meditation madness”: meditation’s popularity, popular religion and unsupervised religion
Publications have used pathologizing language when reporting a boom in the popularity of meditation practices: a ‘meditation madness’. I argue that analysing the intellectual roots of the category ‘popular religion’ improves our understanding of debates about the status of meditation and its potenti...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
2023
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| In: |
Culture and religion
Year: 2023, Volume: 23, Issue: 1, Pages: 21-45 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
USA
/ Meditation process
/ Meditation
/ Buddhism
/ Popularization
/ New Age
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| IxTheo Classification: | AD Sociology of religion; religious policy AE Psychology of religion AG Religious life; material religion AZ New religious movements BL Buddhism KBQ North America ZD Psychology |
| Further subjects: | B
Buddhism
B spiritual-but-not-religious B Meditation B Psychology B folk religion / popular B Secularisation |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Publications have used pathologizing language when reporting a boom in the popularity of meditation practices: a ‘meditation madness’. I argue that analysing the intellectual roots of the category ‘popular religion’ improves our understanding of debates about the status of meditation and its potential adverse effects. My analyses first provide historical context for portrayals of religiocultural activities of ‘the masses’ as irrational and dangerous. But European ideas about ‘the popular’ are also foundational to the very construction of ‘meditation’ in its current dominant forms. Buddhist studies scholars today critique a new ‘popular Buddhism in the West’ precisely because it, in turn, denigrates common Asian Buddhist practices as ‘popular religion’ dross obscuring the true essence of Buddhism (as transmitted through modern(ist) meditation forms). I find that responses to the popularity of meditation may evoke old dichotomies of popular/elite religion, but they often ultimately express concrete, practical anxieties about the recent rapid spread of therapeutic meditation practices. Psychologists studying ‘meditation sickness’, for example, may be less concerned about ‘unofficial’ than ‘unsupervised religion’. They warn that ‘meditation mania’ risks actually rendering meditators manic, that, without guidance from responsible educated (if not elite) teachers, uninformed meditators can, indeed, experience episodes of mania and other difficulties. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-5629 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Culture and religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/14755610.2023.2294023 |