Meditation and religious reform
Joanna Cook
Cambridge University Press eBooks August 5, 2010 DOI: 10.1017/cbo9780511760785.004 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Historical analysis Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Meditation |
| Key points | Argues that vipassanā meditation in contemporary Thai Buddhism has become a widely accessible practice through which lay and monastic practitioners seek and often find experiences of impermanence, suffering, and non-self, and that the practice's spread is intertwined with reform, localism, and commoditization. |
Abstract
In contemporary Thai Buddhism there is massive variation in the foci of Buddhist practice. While some monastic and lay organizations focus on ascetic discipline, others focus on ritual practices, social welfare projects or wealth creation. In Thailand modernist Buddhist movements have elaborated Buddhist responsibilities as both a social concern and a personal responsibility of purification. Furthermore, with the proliferation of practices and foci of monastics and laity it is possible for practitioners to incorporate diverse perspectives and motivations into their understanding of Thai Buddhism. This book is an analysis of the cultural elaborations of vipassanā meditation and an examination of the ways in which this specific practice has implicated monastic subjectivity and community at this historical juncture. The burgeoning popularity of vipassanā meditation as a practice available to all people, lay or monastic, is fast becoming a verifying technique by which people seek and often find the experiences of the religious tenets of impermanence, suffering and non-self. The focus of some monasteries on vipassanā propagation is a recent development in Thai Buddhism and has occurred in tandem with hybrid processes of reform, localism and commoditization. In this chapter, I locate the monastery on which this book is based in the history of the Thai vipassanā meditation movement and the broader reformist landscape that has characterized recent decades of religious change.
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 |