Meditation and the Modern Encounter between Asia and the West
Richard E. King
The Oxford Handbook of Meditation October 4, 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198808640.013.2 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Meditation |
| Key points | Argues that the colonial encounter between Europe and Asia led Asian meditative practices to be abstracted from their traditional cosmological, ritualistic, and cultural contexts and reframed through modern Western conceptual binaries, including a Cartesian mind-body distinction and oppositions between science and religion and between religious tradition and de-traditionalized spirituality. Contends that Western approaches to Asian meditation reveal as much about the modern Western episteme as about the Asian traditions themselves. |
Abstract
Abstract In the West, meditation has been particularly associated with Asian religions and seen as illustrative of the mystical nature of eastern culture. This chapter explores the impact of the colonial encounter between Europe and Asia. In this context, Asian meditative practices became abstracted from their traditional cosmological, ritualistic, and cultural contexts and reframed in terms of key conceptual binaries and assumptions deriving from modern Western culture. These include a Cartesian distinction between mind and body (with mind being associated with meditation and Buddhist mindfulness, and the body linked to “Hindu” yoga and its modern postural forms). Asian forms of meditation were translated according to a modern psychological framework and encountered in relation to the dichotomies between science and religion on the one hand and religious tradition and a de-traditionalized notion of spirituality on the other. The approaches taken in the Western encounter with Asian meditation tell us as much about the intellectual grooves of the modern Western episteme as they do about the Asian meditative traditions to which they relate.
Comparable studies
Other theoretical and historical papers on meditation, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition. | 2004 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mechanisms of mindfulness | 2005 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| How Does Mindfulness Meditation Work? Proposing Mechanisms of Action From a Conceptual and Neural Perspective | 2011 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression | 2006 | Theoretical or philosophical paper | |
| Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): a framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness | 2012 | Theoretical or philosophical paper |