Excerpt: What I intend to do in this paper is offer a non-exhaustive perspective on the original core aspirations, as I experienced them, behind introducing mindfulness as a practice and as a way of being into the mainstream world, initially through medicine and health care in the form of MBSR, and then—as the meme and practice took root and interest spread with increasing evidence of its...
Buddhist-derived meditation practices are currently being employed as a popular form of health promotion. While meditation programs draw inspiration from Buddhist textual sources for the benefits of meditation, these sources also acknowledge a wide range of other effects beyond health-related outcomes. The Varieties of Contemplative Experience study investigates meditation-related experiences...
While addressing global problems including conflict and violence is a common human agenda, they are human-caused: They are created and sustained through our thoughts. Though external causes and conditions cannot be ignored, the most fundamental problem is an epistemological one—our way of knowing and viewing the world. As the shape of the global conditions relies on our thoughts or ways of...
This chapter discusses how Mongol Buddhist leaders have combined traditional and new religious elements in innovative ways to create modern or post-modern religious institutions in Ulaanbaatar since the turn of the century. Among the Dharma centres in Ulaanbaatar, only the Jetsundampa Khutugtu Centre has been founded by a Mongol and is supported by the Mongol business community rather than by...
Journal of Mental HealthFebruary 1, 2017Yuichi Kasai, Toshihiko Sakakibara, Thein Aung Kyaw et al.
Meditation is widely used as a therapeutic measure because it can effectively reduce stress, pain, and improve the mental health, but there are many unclear points about the psychological effects of meditation. The purpose of this study is to verify the psychological effects of meditation. The short version of Profile of Mood States (POMS-SF) and the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II...
The reaction to multiple religious belonging has been fraught with anxiety in the monotheistic traditions. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of people report belonging to multiple religions. I propose that it is most useful to think of multiple religious belonging not so much as an expression of choice, but just the opposite. Multiple religious belonging is best explained as the ontological...
I argue in this essay that Stoic philosophers in the late Greco-Roman period utilized philosophical exercises and spiritual technologies similar in form to a meditative exercise currently practiced in Buddhism. I begin with an in-depth discussion of moral development in the late Stoa, focusing particularly on their theories of cosmopolitanism and oikeiōsis. These theoretical commitments, I...
One of the core teachings of Buddhism is the doctrine of anattā. I argue that there is good evidence that anattā as understood in early Buddhism should be viewed less as a doctrine and a metaphysical pronouncement (‘no-Self’) than as a soteriological claim (‘not-self’) – an appeal and a method to achieve, or move progressively closer to, liberation. This view opens up anattā to empirical...
1: Placebo effect sometimes plausibly has powerful effects. 2: Buddhism philosophy holds that every living animal is sentient, and has a consciousness and killing them is bad for the killer and freeing them is good somehow. Consciousness may involve some aspects of quantum mechanism as Roger Penrose’s Orch OR' theory of consciousness pointed out. 3: Although previous studies show that there is...
Reviewed by: Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception by Eviatar Shulman David Nowakowski (bio) Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative Perception. By Eviatar Shulman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xviii + 206. isbn 978-1-107-06239-9. Eviatar Shulman’s Rethinking the Buddha: Early Buddhist Philosophy as Meditative...
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...
Interventions using the "Four Immeasurables Meditations" (FIM) are effective for various outcomes; however, whether increased meditation practice in these interventions leads to better results has not been well investigated. This systematic review included 22 FIM interventions that reported associations between the amount of meditation practice and its outcomes. Despite the heterogeneity in...
Macrostate and microstate characteristics of interregional nonlinear interdependence of brain dynamics are investigated for Zen-meditation and normal resting EEG. Evaluation of nonlinear interdependence based on nonlinear dynamic theory and phase space reconstruction is employed in the 30-channel electroencephalographic (EEG) signals to characterize the functioning interactions among different...
Buddhist Philosophy of Mind Gereon Kopf Welcome to the third issue of the Journal of Buddhist Philosophy. As it has been our practice, this issue contains a special issue on Buddhist psychology graciously guest edited by Christian Coseru, philosophical reflections on the purpose of Buddhist philosophy, peer-reviewed essays on a variety of topics, and reviews of recent publications in our field....