Rethinking Meditation Buddhist Meditative Practice in Ancient and Modern Worlds

by McMahan, David L.

• ISBN13: 9780197661741
• ISBN10: 0197661742
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-07-28
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

David L. McMahan is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Making of Buddhist Modernism (2008), Empty Vision: Metaphor and Visionary Imagery in Mahayana Buddhism (2002), and several articles on Mahayana Buddhism in South Asia and Buddhism in the modern world. He is also the co-editor of Buddhism, Meditation and Science (2017), editor of Buddhism in the Modern World (2012).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction: Thinking about Meditation
Chapter 2: Neural Maps and Enlightenment Machines
Chapter 3: What Difference Does Context Make? Meditation and Social Imaginaries
Chapter 4: Meditation in the Pali Social Imaginary I: The Phenomenology and
Ethics of Monastic Mindfulness
Chapter 5: Meditation in the Pali Social Imaginary II: Corporeal and Cognitive Mindfulness
Chapter 6: Meditation and Cultural Repertoires
Chapter 7: Deconstructive Meditation and the Search for the Buddha Within
Chapter 8: Meditation and the Ethical Subject I: Secularism and the Ethic of Appreciation
Chapter 9: Meditation and the Ethical Subject II: The Ethic of Authenticity
Chapter 10: Meditation and the Ethical Subject IIIa: The Ethic of Autonomy
Chapter 11: Meditation and the Ethical Subject IIIb: Affordances, Disruption, and Activism
Chapter 12: Meditation and the Ethical Subject IV: Individualism and Fragmentation in the Mirrors of Secularism-- the Ethic of Interdependence
Postscript: The Iron Age and the Anthropocene