7 papers in the library · 26 citations · publishing 2017-2023
Rethinking Meditation September 14, 2023 David L. Mcmahan
Abstract This chapter brings early Buddhist meditation literature—especially the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta—into conversation with ideas in phenomenology and cognitive science that address the distinction between conscious, effortful activity and habitual activity rooted in the tacit assumptions, dispositions, and categories of a particular cultural context. Some meditation practices disrupt the tacit...
Rethinking Meditation September 14, 2023 David L. Mcmahan
Abstract Rather than understanding meditation as an objective ascertainment of private internal contents of consciousness, this chapter theorizes meditative experiences as a systemic part of the ecology of a sociocultural system. Like patients and their doctors, meditators negotiate the significance of their experiences with teachers, texts, and traditions. This dialogue shapes not only the...
Rethinking Meditation September 14, 2023 David L. Mcmahan
Abstract: The ethic of authenticity in modern western thought envisions individuals in their uniqueness in an antagonistic relationship to the surrounding cultural norms. One’s unique, authentic self is discovered or created by transcending cultural conditioning. As Buddhist meditation became intertwined with western thought, it came to be seen as a method for overcoming alienation and social...
Rethinking Meditation September 14, 2023 David L. Mcmahan
Abstract: In classical Buddhist literature, meditative practices were usually geared toward transcendent freedom, but they also served immanent purposes. In the West, the freedom that meditation leads to is often interpreted along lines of western theories of autonomy. There is a tension between the “inner citadel” model, in which meditation creates an interior space of invulnerability to...
Rethinking Meditation September 14, 2023 David L. Mcmahan
Abstract: Contemplations of the insides of bodies and of corpses in early meditation literature show that seeing the body “as it is” was not bare, nonconceptual, value-neutral awareness but a matter of highlighting the body’s vulnerability and foulness and creating a sense of detachment and distaste toward it. Other meditations in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta present Buddhist taxonomies through which...
Oxford Scholarship Online October 19, 2017 David L. Mcmahan
Meditation is often described in terms of internal “states” that presumably arise in anyone who practices them diligently. These practices, however, only “work” in specific social and cultural contexts, and the work they do may be quite different in divergent contexts. McMahan theorizes meditation practices as cultivating ways of being in specific social imaginaries constituted by a cultural...
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) 2017 David L. Mcmahan 26 citations preprint
Buddhism in the modern world offers an example of (1) the porousness of the boundary between the secular and religious; (2) the diversity, fluidity, and constructedness of the very categories of religious and secular, since they appear in different ways among different Buddhist cultures in divergent national contexts; and (3) the way these categories nevertheless have very real-world effects...