Author: Roderick Bucknell Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136804080 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Buddhist meditation, while attracting less popular attention than some other meditative disciplines, has given rise to a particularly rich literature in recent years. Despite differences in style and terminology, these modern writings on Buddhist meditation serve much the same purposes as did the manuals and commentaries of the classical masters: to explicate and interpret the Buddha's teachings on meditation, to clarify the nature and value of the various meditative techniques and attainments, and/or to offer advice on the actual practice of meditation. Meditators are increasingly inclined to compare and evaluate critically what the different contemporary meditation masters have to say, to weigh up the results of relevant scientific studies, or to consult translations of the primary texts in search of the Buddha's 'original' teachings on meditation. Writers on meditation are also increasingly adopting an appropriately critical approach, particularly as regards the reliability of textual accounts. Relatively few still commit the old error of assuming that the Pali canon is a complete and faithful record of what the Buddha said on the subject, or that the classical commentators were infallible authorities. The present collection of twenty-eight readings is designed to give meditators, researchers, and general readers ready access to representative samples of those writings, and to the principal relevant texts.
Author: Edo Shonin Publisher: Springer ISBN: 9783319498669 Category : Psychology Languages : en Pages : 365
Book Description
This book explores a wide range of mindfulness and meditative practices and traditions across Buddhism. It deepens contemporary understanding of mindfulness by examining its relationship with key Buddhist teachings, such as the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eight-Fold Path. In addition, the volume explores how traditional mindfulness can be more meaningfully incorporated into current psychological research and clinical practice with individuals and groups (e.g., through the Buddhist Psychological Model). Key topics featured in this volume include: Ethics and mindfulness in Pāli Buddhism and their implications for secular mindfulness-based applications. Mindfulness of emptiness and the emptiness of mindfulness. Buddhist teachings that support the psychological principles in a mindfulness program. A practical contextualization and explanatory framework for mindfulness-based interventions. Mindfulness in an authentic, transformative, everyday Zen practice. Pristine mindfulness. Buddhist Foundations of Mindfulness is an indispensable resource for clinical psychologists, and affiliated medical and mental health professionals, including specialists in complementary and alternative medicine as well as social work as well as teachers of Buddhism and meditation.
Author: Sangharakshita Publisher: Windhorse Publications ISBN: 0957470010 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 950
Book Description
How much meditation is good for you? Why visualize an Enlightened being? Are there places that meditation doesn't reach? All of these questions and very many more are tackled in this substantial compilation of Sangharakshita's teachings on meditation, drawn from previously published works and from the unpublished transcripts of seminars. Discussions reveal how Sangharakshita learned the practices on which his system of meditation - 'an organic, living system' - is based, and how that system has evolved over the years.
Author: David McMahan Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0190495820 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
The scientific study of Buddhist forms of meditation has surged in recent years, capturing the popular imagination and reshaping conceptions of what meditation is and what it can do. For perhaps the first time in history, meditation has shifted from Buddhist monasteries and practice centers to some of the most prominent and powerful modern institutions in the world, as well as non-institutional settings. As their contexts change, so do the practices-sometimes drastically. New ways of thinking about meditation are emerging as it moves toward more secular settings, ways that profoundly affect millions of lives all over the world. To understand these changes and their effects, the essays in this volume explore the unaddressed complexities in the interrelations between Buddhist history and thought and the scientific study of meditation. The contributors bring philosophical, cultural, historical, and ethnographic perspectives to bear, considering such issues as the philosophical presuppositions behind practice, the secularization of meditation, the values and goods assumed in clinical approaches, and the sorts of subjects that take shape under the influence of these transformed and transformative practices-all the more powerful for being so often formulated with the authority of scientific discourse.
Author: Patricia Q Campbell Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199793948 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 251
Book Description
Knowing Body, Moving Mind investigates ritualizing and learning in introductory meditation classes at two Buddhist centers in Toronto, Canada. The centers, Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti, are led and attended by Western (sometimes called "convert') Buddhists: that is, people from non-Buddhist familial and cultural backgrounds. Inspired by theories that suggest that rituals impart new knowledge or understanding, Patricia Campbell examines how introductory meditation students learn through formal Buddhist practice. Along the way, she also explores practitioners' reasons for enrolling in meditation classes, their interests in Buddhism, and their responses to formal Buddhist practices and to ritual in general. Based on ethnographic interviews and participant-observation fieldwork, the text follows interview participants' reflections on what they learned in meditation classes and through personal practice, and what roles meditation and other ritual practices played in that learning. Participants' learning experiences are illuminated by an influential learning theory called Bloom's Taxonomy, while the rites and practices taught and performed at the centers are explored using performance theory, a method which focuses on the performative elements of ritual's postures and gestures. But the study expands the performance framework as well, by demonstrating that performative ritualizing includes the concentration techniques that take place in a meditator's mind. Such techniques are received as traditional mental acts or behaviors that are standardized, repetitively performed, and variously regarded as special, elevated, spiritual or religious. Having established a link between mental and physical forms of ritualizing, the study then demonstrates that the repetitive mental techniques of meditation practice train the mind to develop new skills in the same way that physical postures and gestures train the body. The mind is thus experienced as both embodied and gestural, and the whole of the body as socially and ritually informed.
Author: Rod Meade Sperry Publisher: Shambhala Publications ISBN: 1611800579 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
A practical, accessible guide to the fundamentals of Buddhist meditation, with pointers from some of today's most respected Buddhist teachers, including Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, Cyndi Lee, and Sharon Salzberg. As countless meditators have learned firsthand, meditation practice can positively transform the way we see and experience our lives. This practical, accessible guide to the fundamentals of Buddhist meditation introduces you to the practice, explains how it is approached in the main schools of Buddhism, and offers advice and inspiration from Buddhism’s most renowned and effective meditation teachers, including Pema Chödrön, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, Sharon Salzberg, Norman Fischer, Ajahn Chah, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, Sylvia Boorstein, Noah Levine, Matthieu Ricard, Judy Lief, and many others. Topics include how to build excitement and energy to start a meditation routine and keep it going, setting up a meditation space, working with and through boredom, what to look for when seeking others to meditate with, how to know when it’s time to try doing a formal meditation retreat, how to bring the practice “off the cushion” with walking meditation and other practices, and much more.
Author: Roderick Bucknell
Author: Paravahera Vajirañana Mahathera
Author: Elvin W. Jones
Author: Edo Shonin
Author: Parawahera Vajiranana
Author: Sangharakshita
Author: Dr. Sarah Shaw
Author: David McMahan
Author: Patricia Q Campbell
Author: Rod Meade Sperry