357 papers in the library · 587 citations · publishing 2011-2026
Religions April 29, 2021 Anne Austad, Hanneke Muthert 2 citations
William James’s seminal book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902/2012), describes the phenomenology and ‘fruits’ (James 2012, p [...]
Religions April 19, 2021 L. Kendall
Shamanship is a thing-ish practice. Early missionary observers in Korea noted that features of the landscape, quotidian objects, and specialized paraphernalia figure in the work of shamans (mansin) and in popular religious practice more generally. Subsequent ethnographers observed similar engagements with numinous things, from mountains to painted images, things vested with the presence of soul...
Religions March 21, 2021 Ngar-sze Lau
This paper examines how the teaching of embodied practices of transnational Buddhist meditation has been designated for healing depression explicitly in contemporary Chinese Buddhist communities with the influences of Buddhist modernism in Southeast Asia and globalization. Despite the revival of traditional Chan school meditation practices since the Open Policy, various transnational lay...
Religions March 13, 2021 Brentyn J. Ramm 6 citations
In this paper, I investigate the phenomenology of awakening in Chinese Zen Buddhism. In this tradition, to awaken is to ‘see your true nature’. In particular, the two aspects of awakening are: (1) seeing that the nature of one’s self or mind is empty or void and (2) an erasing of the usual (though merely apparent) boundary between subject and object. In the early Zen tradition, there are many...
Religions February 10, 2021 Joe Markowski
What is the relationship between Zen experience and language? Is Zen awakening/enlightenment ineffable? In this article, I will address this general question by providing a panoramic treatment of Dōgen’s (道元) philosophy of language which Hee-Jin Kim characterizes as “realizational”. Building on the research of Kim, Victor Sōgen Hori and Dale S. Wright, I maintain that the idea of ineffable...
Religions January 29, 2021 Steven Heine
This paper explicates the complex relationship between contemplative practice and enlightened activity conducted both on and off the meditative cushion as demonstrated in the approach of the Sōtō Zen Buddhist founder Dōgen (1200–1253). I examine Dōgen’s intricate views regarding how language, or what I refer to as just saying, can and should be used in creative yet often puzzling and perplexing...
Religions January 23, 2021 Eunil David Cho 5 citations
This article focuses on exploring the concept of narrative identity, which has emerged as an integrative concept in various academic fields. Particularly in philosophy and psychology, scholars have claimed that humans are storytellers by nature and tell their stories that develop in them a sense of identity. However, this concept has been criticized by those who have argued that while some...
Religions December 6, 2020 Nicolae Turcan 10 citations
Drawing a clear line between phenomenology and theology remains a challenging endeavor. This article has two parts: The first one argues that, from a methodological point of view, there is a need for a theo-phenomenology, a phenomenology which acknowledges religious faith as a given. The second part of the article tries to present the essence of religious call in Eastern Orthodox spirituality....
Religions December 5, 2020 Pavel Nosachev
The main research issues of the article are the determination of the genesis of theology created in Supernatural and the understanding of ways in which this show transforms a traditional Christian theological narrative. The methodological framework of the article, on the one hand, is the theory of the occulture (C. Partridge), and on the other, the narrative theory proposed in U. Eco’s semiotic...
Religions November 5, 2020 June Mcdaniel 3 citations
On the island of Bali in Indonesia, the traditional Hindu religious leaders are the pedandas, or brahmin high priests. Their religious status is largely based on their mystical states, during which they create the highest and most valuable form of holy water, which is needed for all religious rituals on the island. It is one of the rare examples in world religions where mysticism is not only...
Religions November 4, 2020 Ray Buckner
Gender dysphoria is considered a pronounced experience of distress in the bodies and minds of some transgender people. Examining the text Zen Mind, Beginners Mind by Shunryū Suzuki, I analyze some of the difficulties that may arise for transgender practitioners experiencing acutely strong gender dysphoria within the Sōtō Zen meditation experience. I seek to understand how physical and...
Religions October 31, 2020 Gloria I-Ling Chien 7 citations
The burgeoning application of contemplative pedagogy (CP) in Buddhist studies courses has been widely discussed; yet, how educators incorporate it with other teaching strategies has not attracted much scholarly attention. Drawing from the author’s teaching experience at a Jesuit University, this article demonstrates that integrating CP’s first-person, second-person, and third-person approaches...
Religions October 31, 2020 Arpita Mitra
There has been a long-standing academic debate on the religious orientation of Śrī Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṁsa (1836–1886), one of the leading religious figures of modern India. In the light of his teachings, it is possible to accept that Rāmakṛṣṇa’s ideas were Vedāntic, albeit not in a sectarian or exclusive way. This article explores the question of where exactly to place him in the chequered...
Religions October 29, 2020 Elpine M. de Boer
The main aim of the present study is to investigate when “loss of self” results in scaredness or anxiety during or after an out-of body-experience (OBE). An OBE is an intense form of (bodily) self loss in which people have the impression that their self is located outside their body. In a sample of respondents reporting to have had an OBE (n = 171), anxiety and different conceptualizations of...
Religions October 26, 2020 Lee Irwin 1 citation
The following article is an exploration of supernal dreaming, a type of dream that engages the dreamer as a profound, participatory, and often revelatory event. Dream types are not well developed in dream research; this article contributes to the development of a more typological approach to dream analysis. Four dream types are presented and contextualized with reference to their metaphysical...
Religions July 21, 2020 Carlos Miguel Gómez Rincón 3 citations
This article offers an intercultural interpretation of the sense of the sacred in the practice of yage shamanism in Colombia. This practice is based on the ritual use of a plant medicine which for centuries has been the basis of the medical, spiritual and cultural systems of indigenous peoples of the Amazon piedmont in Colombia, Ecuador and Perú. Since the 1990s, this practice has expanded to...
Religions June 26, 2020 Terje Sparby 12 citations
This article presents the results of a qualitative study of Anthroposophic meditation, which arose in the German-speaking world in the early 20th Century focusing on cognition, self-development, and pro-social action. The objective was to explore this previously unstudied form of meditation. The current sample (N = 30) consists of long-term practitioners of Anthroposophic meditation....
Religions June 12, 2020 Elsa Lau, Clayton H. Mcclintock, Marianna Graziosi et al.
This study investigates the lived-experience of spiritual life in contemporary USA, India, and China. A qualitative coding frame was constructed based on participant responses to open-ended questions regarding spirituality. Qualitative analysis was facilitated by the use of Dedoose, a mixed methods software. The exploratory approach of this study takes on a cross-culturally comparative lens,...
Religions June 10, 2020 Robert Kritzer
Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra is an Indian Buddhist sutra dating to the first half of the first millennium. Chapter 7 of the sutra consists of a very long meditation on the body, unusual in Buddhist literature for its anatomical, especially osteological, detail. The meditation also includes extensive descriptions of many internal worms as well as the internal winds that destroy the worms at the...
Religions May 29, 2020 Hyun Gong Moon
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is applied in various fields such as medicine, cognitive science, business, and education. The mindfulness of Buddhism is at the center of MBSR, and this means that Buddhist meditation has a great effect on modern society. For Buddhist meditations on death, the Aṅguttara Nikāya suggests mindfulness of death (maraṇasati), referring to ten methods of...
Religions March 2, 2020 Larry D. Bouchard
This essay explores theatrical drama alongside aspects of religious dimensionality David Tracy analyzes in terms of limit experience, limit language, and limit questions. The claim is that metatheatrical forms can correlate with limit dimensions, a correlation which may prove as pertinent as ritual for linking drama with religious experience, thought, and practice. Here, metatheatre and limit...
Religions December 25, 2019 Mira Niculescu
Since the late 1990s, the expression “Jewish Mindfulness” has become ubiquitous in Jewish community centers (JCCs) and synagogues in America, in Israel, and in the Western diaspora. “Mindfulness”, a secular meditation technique originating from Buddhism which has been popularized in Western culture through its recontextualization within the Western therapeutic culture, has been increasingly...
Religions November 12, 2019 Chae Young Kim
This essay attempts to determine whether Daisaku Ikeda can be seen as a Jamesian psychologist of religion. Concerning the development of this essay, it first focuses on a common concern that exists if we look at the work of William James and the Psychology of Religion in terms of how it exists as a distinct movement and how it is related to Ikeda’s perception of religion within a secular world....
Religions June 1, 2019 D. M. Stuart 5 citations
In an early discourse from the Saṃyuttanikāya, the Buddha states: “I do not see any other order of living beings so diversified as those in the animal realm. Even those beings in the animal realm have been diversified by the mind, yet the mind is even more diverse than those beings in the animal realm.” This paper explores how this key early Buddhist idea gets elaborated in various layers of...
Religions May 17, 2019 Frederick M. Smith 1 citation
The “inner organ” (antaḥkaraṇa) in the Indian philosophical school called Sāṃkhya is applied in two different experiential contexts: in the act of transcendence according to the path of yoga explored in the Yogasūtras of Patañjali (ca. 350 CE) and in the process of identity shift that occurs in possession by a deity in a broader range of Indian cultural practices. The act of transcendence will...