Asian Traditions Of Meditation

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Asian Traditions of Meditation

Author : Halvor Eifring
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2018-01-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780824876678

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Asian Traditions of Meditation by Halvor Eifring Pdf

Meditation has flourished in different parts of the world ever since the foundations of the great civilizations were laid. It played a vital role in the formation of Asian cultures that trace much of their heritage to ancient India and China. This volume brings together for the first time studies of the major traditions of Asian meditation as well as material on scientific approaches to meditation. It delves deeply into the individual traditions while viewing each of them from a global perspective, examining both historical and generic connections between meditative practices from numerous historical periods and different parts of the Eurasian continent. It seeks to identify the cultural and historical peculiarities of Asian schools of meditation while recognizing basic features of meditative practice across cultures, thereby taking the first step toward a framework for the comparative study of meditation. The book, accessibly written by scholars from several fields, opens with chapters that discuss the definition and classification of meditation. These are followed by contributions on Yoga and Tantra, which are often subsumed under the broad label of Hinduism; Jainism and Sikhism, Indian traditions not usually associated with meditation; Buddhist approaches found in Southeast Asia, Tibet, and China; and the indigenous Chinese traditions, Daoism and Neo-Confucianism. The final chapter explores recent scientific interest in meditation, which, despite its Western orientation, remains almost exclusively concerned with practices of Asian origin. Until a few years ago a major obstacle to the study of specific meditation practices within the traditions explored here was a widespread scholarly orientation that prioritized doctrinal issues and sociocultural contexts over actual practice. The contributors seek to counter this bias and supplement concerns over doctrine and context with the historical study of meditative practice. Asian Traditions of Meditation will appeal broadly to readers interested in meditation, mindfulness, and spirituality and those in the emerging field of contemplative education, as well as students and scholars of Asian and religious studies.

Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism

Author : Peter N. Gregory
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 269 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2021-05-25
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780824842932

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Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism by Peter N. Gregory Pdf

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Chan Before Chan

Author : Eric M. Greene
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2021-01-31
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780824886875

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Chan Before Chan by Eric M. Greene Pdf

What is Buddhist meditation? What is going on—and what should be going on—behind the closed or lowered eyelids of the Buddha or Buddhist adept seated in meditation? And in what ways and to what ends have the answers to these questions mattered for Buddhists themselves? Focusing on early medieval China, this book takes up these questions through a cultural history of the earliest traditions of Buddhist meditation (chan), before the rise of the Chan (Zen) School in the eighth century. In sharp contrast to what would become typical in the later Chan School, early Chinese Buddhists approached the ancient Buddhist practice of meditation primarily as a way of gaining access to a world of enigmatic but potentially meaningful visionary experiences. In Chan Before Chan, Eric Greene brings this approach to meditation to life with a focus on how medieval Chinese Buddhists interpreted their own and others’ visionary experiences and the nature of the authority they ascribed to them. Drawing from hagiography, ritual manuals, material culture, and the many hitherto rarely studied meditation manuals translated from Indic sources into Chinese or composed in China in the 400s, Greene argues that during this era meditation and the mastery of meditation came for the first time to occupy a real place in the Chinese Buddhist social world. Heirs to wider traditions that had been shared across India and Central Asia, early medieval Chinese Buddhists conceived of “chan” as something that would produce a special state of visionary sensitivity. The concrete visionary experiences that resulted from meditation were understood as things that could then be interpreted, by a qualified master, as indicative of the mediator’s purity or impurity. Buddhist meditation, though an elite discipline that only a small number of Chinese Buddhists themselves undertook, was thus in practice and in theory constitutively integrated into the cultic worlds of divination and “repentance” (chanhui) that were so important within the medieval Chinese religious world as a whole.

Esoteric Theravada

Author : Kate Crosby
Publisher : Shambhala Publications
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2020-12-22
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780834843073

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Esoteric Theravada by Kate Crosby Pdf

A groundbreaking exploration of a practice tradition that was nearly lost to history. Theravada Buddhism, often understood as the school that most carefully preserved the practices taught by the Buddha, has undergone tremendous change over time. Prior to Western colonialism in Asia—which brought Western and modernist intellectual concerns, such as the separation of science and religion, to bear on Buddhism—there existed a tradition of embodied, esoteric, and culturally regional Theravada meditation practices. This once-dominant traditional meditation system, known as borān kammatthāna, is related to—yet remarkably distinct from—Vipassana and other Buddhist and secular mindfulness practices that would become the hallmark of Theravada Buddhism in the twentieth century. Drawing on a quarter century of research, scholar Kate Crosby offers the first holistic discussion of borān kammatthāna, illuminating the historical events and cultural processes by which the practice has been marginalized in the modern era.

Chinese Traditional Meditation

Author : Weimin Kwauk
Publisher : AuthorHouse
Page : 92 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Self-Help
ISBN : 9781434301512

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Chinese Traditional Meditation by Weimin Kwauk Pdf

About a renegade pirate, a ruthless man set forth to pillage and plunder across the galaxy. Set in motion a plan of revenge against a man named RC Steel. In this story, a friend will be found that was lost, their will be betrayal of another and a destruction of a homeworld. Revenge like no other and a great love of all centuries, that RC Steel must survive to save his great love in the " Pirates of the Stars."

The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation

Author : Eric M. Greene
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2021-01-31
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780824884444

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The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation by Eric M. Greene Pdf

In the early 400s, numerous Indian and Central Asian Buddhist “meditation masters” (chanshi) traveled to China, where they established the first enduring traditions of Buddhist meditation practice in East Asia. The forms of contemplative practice that these missionaries brought with them, and which their Chinese students further developed, remained for several centuries the basic understanding of “meditation” (chan) in China. Although modern scholars and readers have long been familiar with the approaches to meditation of the Chan (Zen) School that later became so popular throughout East Asia, these earlier and in some ways more pervasive forms of practice have long been overlooked or ignored. This volume presents a comprehensive study of the content and historical formation, as well as complete English translations, of two of the most influential manuals in which these approaches to Buddhist meditation are discussed: the Scripture on the Secret Essential Methods of Chan (Chan Essentials) and the Secret Methods for Curing Chan Sickness (Methods for Curing). Translated here into English for the first time, these documents reveal a distinctly visionary form of Buddhist meditation whose goal is the acquisition of concrete, symbolic visions attesting to the practitioner’s purity and progress toward liberation. Both texts are “apocryphal” scriptures: Taking the form of Indian Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese, they were in fact new compositions, written or at least assembled in China in the first half of the fifth century. Though written in China, their historical significance extends beyond the East Asian context as they are among the earliest written sources anywhere to record certain kinds of information about Buddhist meditation that hitherto had been the preserve of oral tradition and personal initiation. To this extent they indeed divulge, as their titles claim, the “secrets” of Buddhist meditation. Through them, we witness a culture of Buddhist meditation that has remained largely unknown but which for many centuries was widely shared across North India, Central Asia, and China.

Purity of Heart and Contemplation

Author : Bruno Barnhart,Yuese Huang
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 392 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : UVA:X004592803

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Purity of Heart and Contemplation by Bruno Barnhart,Yuese Huang Pdf

This is the fruit of a weeklong intermonastic dialogue held at New Camaldoli Hermitage in Big Sur, California. Chinese traditions of Taoism, Confucianism, and Chan Buddhism are included, in addition to Zen Buddhism and Hinduism. Encounters between Christian and Hindu or Buddhist monastics have been occurring for several decades, most notably signalized in the 1998 book The Gethsemani Encounter. The themes purity of heart and contemplation are central to the monastic quest and they are also universal, offering a meeting point, an area of spirituality that is shared by all the traditions involved.

Meditation and Culture

Author : Halvor Eifring
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 240 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2015-09-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781472579928

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Meditation and Culture by Halvor Eifring Pdf

Behind the stereotype of a solitary meditator closing his eyes to the world, meditation always takes place in close interaction with the surrounding culture. Meditation and Culture: The Interplay of Practice and Context explores cases in which the relation between meditative practice and cultural context is particularly complex. The internationally-renowned contributors discuss practices that travel from one culture to another, or are surrounded by competing cultures. They explore cultures that bring together competing practices, or that are themselves mosaics of elements of different origins. They seek to answer the question: What is the relationship between meditation and culture? The effects of meditation may arise from its symbolic value within larger webs of cultural meaning, as in the contextual view that still dominates cultural and religious studies. They may also be psychobiological responses to the practice itself, the cultural context merely acting as a catalyst for processes originating in the body and mind of the practitioner. Meditation and Culture gives no single definitive explanation, but taken together, the different viewpoints presented point to the complexity of the relationship.

The Oxford Handbook of Meditation

Author : Miguel Farias,David Brazier,Mansur Lalljee
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 1038 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2021-10-21
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780192536389

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The Oxford Handbook of Meditation by Miguel Farias,David Brazier,Mansur Lalljee Pdf

Meditation techniques, including mindfulness, have become popular wellbeing practices and the scientific study of their effects has recently turned 50 years old. But how much do we know about them: what were they developed for and by whom? How similar or different are they, how effective can they be in changing our minds and biology, what are their social and ethical implications? The Oxford Handbook of Meditation is the most comprehensive volume published on meditation, written in accessible language by world-leading experts on the science and history of these techniques. It covers the development of meditation across the world and the varieties of its practices and experiences. It includes approaches from various disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and sociology and it explores its potential for therapeutic and social change, as well as unusual or negative effects. Edited by practitioner-researchers, this book is the ultimate guide for all interested in meditation, including teachers, clinicians, therapists, researchers, or anyone who would like to learn more about this topic.

Asian Healing Traditions in Counseling and Psychotherapy

Author : Roy Moodley,Ted Lo,Na Zhu
Publisher : SAGE Publications
Page : 406 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2017-10-24
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9781483371450

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Asian Healing Traditions in Counseling and Psychotherapy by Roy Moodley,Ted Lo,Na Zhu Pdf

Asian Healing Traditions in Counseling and Psychotherapy explores the various healing approaches and practices in the East and bridges them with those in the West to show counselors how to provide culturally sensitive services to distinct populations. Editors Roy Moodley, Ted Lo, and Na Zhu bring together leading scholars across Asia to demystify and critically analyze traditional Far East Asian healing practices—such as Chinese Taoist Healing practices, Morita Therapy, Naikan Therapy, Mindfulness and Existential Therapy, Buddhism and Mindfulness Meditation, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy—in relation to health and mental health in the West. The book will not only show counselors how to apply Eastern and Western approaches to their practices but will also shape the direction of counseling and psychotherapy research for many years to come.

Meditation and Piety in the Far East

Author : Karl Ludvig Reichelt
Publisher : James Clarke & Co.
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : East Asia
ISBN : 0227172353

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Meditation and Piety in the Far East by Karl Ludvig Reichelt Pdf

The result of more than forty years of intimate contact with the 'religious elite' of the Far East, Dr. Reichelt's book is a study of a too-often remote and unknown world. For the western reader this study reveals the life of the East Asia religious communities, their sanctuaries, sacred writings and daily discipline. These non-Christian religions present a massive front of tradition and dogma, which so far the Christian faith has rarely penetrated. This engaging book is comprehensive in its scope. The author examines the meditation traditions of Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Yoga in detail, drawing on his first-hand experiences. Karl Ludvig Reichelt was one of the few gifted interpreters of the East to the West, who knew the mind of the East Asia religions, and had the respect of their leaders.

Introduction to Buddhist Meditation

Author : Dr. Sarah Shaw
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 328 pages
File Size : 46,8 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN : UOM:39015082703920

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Introduction to Buddhist Meditation by Dr. Sarah Shaw Pdf

First Published in 2008. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Author : Halvor Eifring
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2013-10-24
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781441126085

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Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam by Halvor Eifring Pdf

Meditative practices have flourished in widely different parts of Eurasia, yet historical research on such practices is limited. Research to date has focused on contexts rather than actual practices, and within individual traditions. For the first time in one volume, the meditative practices of the three traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are examined. They are viewed in a global perspective, considering both generic and historical connections to practices in other traditions, particularly in India and East Asia. Their cultural and historical peculiarities are examined, comparing them both to each other and to Asian forms of meditation. The book builds on a notion of meditation as self-administered techniques for inner transformation, a definition which focuses on transformative practice rather than notions of meditative states and mystical experiences. It proposes ways of studying meditative practice historically, and concludes with an essay on the modern scientific interest in meditation.

Be the Refuge

Author : Chenxing Han
Publisher : North Atlantic Books
Page : 345 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2021-01-26
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781623175245

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Be the Refuge by Chenxing Han Pdf

A must-read for modern sanghas--Asian American Buddhists in their own words, on their own terms. Despite the fact that two thirds of U.S. Buddhists identify as Asian American, mainstream perceptions about what it means to be Buddhist in America often whitewash and invisibilize the diverse, inclusive, and intersectional communities that lie at the heart of American Buddhism. Be the Refuge is both critique and celebration, calling out the erasure of Asian American Buddhists while uplifting the complexity and nuance of their authentic stories and vital, thriving communities. Drawn from in-depth interviews with a pan-ethnic, pan-Buddhist group, Be the Refuge is the first book to center young Asian American Buddhists' own voices. With insights from multi-generational, second-generation, convert, and socially engaged Asian American Buddhists, Be the Refuge includes the stories of trailblazers, bridge-builders, integrators, and refuge-makers who hail from a wide range of cultural and religious backgrounds. Championing nuanced representation over stale stereotypes, Han and the 89 interviewees in Be the Refuge push back against false narratives like the Oriental monk, the superstitious immigrant, and the banana Buddhist--typecasting that collapses the multivocality of Asian American Buddhists into tired, essentialized tropes. Encouraging frank conversations about race, representation, and inclusivity among Buddhists of all backgrounds, Be the Refuge embodies the spirit of interconnection that glows at the heart of American Buddhism.

Early Buddhist Meditation

Author : Keren Arbel
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2017-03-16
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781317383994

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Early Buddhist Meditation by Keren Arbel Pdf

This book offers a new interpretation of the relationship between 'insight practice' (satipatthana) and the attainment of the four jhànas (i.e., right samàdhi), a key problem in the study of Buddhist meditation. The author challenges the traditional Buddhist understanding of the four jhànas as states of absorption, and shows how these states are the actualization and embodiment of insight (vipassanà). It proposes that the four jhànas and what we call 'vipassanà' are integral dimensions of a single process that leads to awakening. Current literature on the phenomenology of the four jhànas and their relationship with the 'practice of insight' has mostly repeated traditional Theravàda interpretations. No one to date has offered a comprehensive analysis of the fourfold jhàna model independently from traditional interpretations. This book offers such an analysis. It presents a model which speaks in the Nikàyas' distinct voice. It demonstrates that the distinction between the 'practice of serenity' (samatha-bhàvanà) and the 'practice of insight' (vipassanà-bhàvanà) – a fundamental distinction in Buddhist meditation theory – is not applicable to early Buddhist understanding of the meditative path. It seeks to show that the common interpretation of the jhànas as 'altered states of consciousness', absorptions that do not reveal anything about the nature of phenomena, is incompatible with the teachings of the Pàli Nikàyas. By carefully analyzing the descriptions of the four jhànas in the early Buddhist texts in Pàli, their contexts, associations and meanings within the conceptual framework of early Buddhism, the relationship between this central element in the Buddhist path and 'insight meditation' becomes revealed in all its power. Early Buddhist Meditation will be of interest to scholars of Buddhist studies, Asian philosophies and religions, as well as Buddhist practitioners with a serious interest in the process of insight meditation.