Asian Traditions of Meditation

by Halvor Eifring

  In other words, the crux of meditation lies only partly in its symbolic meaning within a larger sociocultural and interpretive context. Just as important are the effects of what a practitioner actually does while meditating. This volume aims to combine the study of meditative practice with an interest in the cultural contexts in which such practice takes place.

  Notes

  1. See, for example, Katz, Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis; and Forman, Problem of Pure Consciousness.

  2. Both books may be profitably read along with two other volumes I edited: Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist Meditation: Cultural Histories and Meditation and Culture: The Interplay of Practice and Context.

  3. See Eifring, “Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” which includes several forms of prayer in the notion of meditation.

  4. Cf. Shaw, Buddhist Meditation, 11. On the problems regarding historical sources for meditative practice, see also Eifring and Holen, “The Uses of Attention,” 2–6; and Bielefeldt, Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, 11–12.

  Glossary

  nen butsu 念佛

  niàn fó 念佛

  Bibliography

  Bielefeldt. Dōgen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

  Eifring, Halvor, ed. Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist Meditation: Cultural Histories. Oslo: Hermes, 2014.

  ———, ed., Meditation and Culture: The Interplay of Practice and Context. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

  ———, ed., Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Cultural Histories. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

  ———. “Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam: Technical Aspects of Devotional Practices.” in Eifring, Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, 3–13.

  Eifring, Halvor, and Are Holen. “The Uses of Attention: Elements of Meditative Practice.” In Eifring, Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist Meditation, 1–26.

  Forman, Robert K. C., ed. The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

  Goleman, Daniel J. The Meditative Mind: The Varieties of Meditative Experience. Los Angeles CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher / Perigree Books, 1988. First published 1977.

  Hadot, Pierre. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Edited by Arnold I. Davidson. Translated by Michael Chase. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1995.

  Katz, Steven T., ed. Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

  Kohn, Livia. Meditation Works: In the Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist Traditions. Magdalena, NM: Three Pines Press, 2008.

  Naranjo, Claudio, and Robert E. Ornstein. On the Psychology of Meditation. New York: Viking Press, 1971.

  Ospina, Maria B., Kenneth Bond, Mohammad Karkhaneh, Lisa Tjosvold, Ben Vandermeer, Yuanyuan Liang, Liza Bialy, Nicola Hooton, Nina Buscemi, Donna M. Dryden, and Terry P. Klassen. “Meditation Practices for Health: State of the Research.” Evidence Report/Technology Assessment, no. 155. Rockville MD: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 2007.

  Robinet, Isabelle. Taoist Meditation: The Mao-shan Tradition of Great Purity. Translated by Julian F. Pas and Norman J. Girardot. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. First published 1979.

  Samuel, Geoffrey. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

  Shaw, Sarah. Buddhist Meditation: An Anthology of Texts from the Pāli Canon. London: Routledge, 2006.

  Taylor, Rodney L. The Confucian Way of Contemplation: Okada Takehiko and the Tradition of Quiet-Sitting. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988.

  1 HALVOR EIFRING

  What Is Meditation?

  The term “meditation” has a long and complex history in the West, and it has no exact correspondent in the Asian traditions.1 The modern usage of the term, however, is strongly influenced by encounters with Asian, and particularly Indian, spiritual practices. As a result, our current understanding of the notion reflects a mixture of Western and various Asian concerns.

  In the West, the term “meditation,” often in its Latin form meditātiō, has been related mostly to Christianity, but also to philosophy and the arts. In this multifaceted tradition, the term typically denotes an associative and nonlinear type of reflection that transcends purely rational thinking but still, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “engages the intellectual or discursive faculties.” Meditation is often based on scripture and seen as a special form of reading, prayer, or imaginative visualization.

  When Western scholars began to translate Indian and other Asian classics, however, the term “meditation” often came to be used in a wider sense, referring to Buddhist and Yogic practices that are, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “aimed at the eradication of rational or worldly mental activity.” Such nondiscursive meanings of the term have been further strengthened by the technical orientation of the scientific investigation of these practices. As pointed out by Are Holen in this volume, almost all scientific meditation research examines technical (rather than content-oriented) practices of Asian origin, and these have also dominated the general popular interest in meditation in the past half century. As a result, the term “meditation” now more often refers to practices that do not primarily engage “the intellectual or discursive faculties.”

  The Asian traditions explored in this volume include a large variety of different practices—discursive and nondiscursive, content-oriented and more narrowly technical. As a starting point for these discussions, the present chapter attempts to define the term “meditation” in a way that poses questions of interest concerning the nature of meditation. The suggested definition is:

  Meditation is an attention-based technique for inner transformation.2

  This definition is broad and inclusive, but in some respects also quite radical. On the one hand, it includes practices that often go by other names, such as certain forms of ritual, prayer, and contemplation. On the other hand, it deliberately excludes a number of practices that are sometimes referred to as meditation, such as pure relaxation techniques. Moreover, the suggested definition refers to technical practices and does not cover spontaneously engendered states of mind. It also excludes artistic or philosophical products often referred to as “meditations” on a given topic.

  This chapter will discuss in some detail the various elements of the definition of “meditation,” as well as the borderlines between meditation and other phenomena. Moreover, by linking these elements to the history of meditation across the Eurasian continent, including material from other chapters in this volume, this chapter will attempt to show the cultural relevance of the definition. Before embarking on this discussion, however, some basic problems relating to definitions need to be addressed.

  Generic Definitions

  Cultural historians sometimes object to the use of generic, unitary definitions such as the one defining meditation as “an attention-based technique for inner transformation,” since these are in some respects deliberately insensitive to cultural and historical features. Such a definition of meditation can easily be accused of the anachronistic and Eurocentric imposition of modern-day Western concepts on a predominantly premodern Asian material, in contrast to the historical, cultural, and social “situatedness” reflected in most of the chapters in this volume. This is easily seen as what cultural historians disparagingly call “essentialism,” referring in this case to a mode of thinking that ascribes a stable and often abstract “essence” to social, cultural, or otherwise human phenomena. Generic definitions, therefore, are often looked upon as tools for natural scientists, who tend to look away from cultural and historical distinctions and to view actual language use and local conceptual schemes as being of limited relevance to their research. Indeed, most earlier generic definitions of meditation have been suggested by scientists working within biomedical research or psychology.3

  Furthermore, while generic definitions avo
id explicit reference to cultural and historical features, they are hardly neutral in the sense of not being influenced by their context. The definition of meditation suggested above is linked to theoretical concerns, and these concerns are also situated in culture and history. For instance, some might argue that the definition’s reference to “technique” reflects a strong Asian influence, since European and Middle Eastern forms of meditation are typically less technical and more devotional than many Indian and Chinese forms, while others might suggest that the reference to “technique” is a product of modern scientific and technological concerns and thus in reality linked to Western thinking. There may be some truth in both suggestions.

  However, the fact that the theoretical implications of a definition are bound to reflect some cultural and historical concerns simply means that these concerns should also be explicated and made the objects of critical reflection, which is indeed what this chapter is trying to do. Our definition points not to the unchanging “essence” of a “thing” called “meditation” but to some features that may, for the moment at least, be seen as useful and interesting to explore and debate.

  In any case, it is not clear what the alternative to a generic definition would be. As pointed out by the historian of religion Jonathan Z. Smith, we should not “rest content with reproducing native lexicography and, thereby, give in to the prevalent ethos of localism, branding every attempt at generalization a western imposition…. How ‘they’ use a word cannot substitute for the systematic stipulative and precising procedures by which the academy contests and seeks to control second-order, specialized usage.”4 In particular, it would be hard to see what a comparative study of meditation would be comparing if it were solely based on local concepts rather than a notion of meditation that supersedes each individual language and culture.

  Smith’s own suggestion of a “self-consciously polythetic mode of classification which surrender[s] the idea of perfect, unique, single differentia”5 does not seem to solve the problem. Smith himself admits that he knows of “no examples of attempts at the polythetic classification of religions or religious phenomena,”6 and a reviewer of Smith’s work points out that “the reader who expects an exhaustive list of [the] characteristics [of a polythetic definition of religion] is in for a disappointment; Smith does not supply it.”7 While later scholars have made a few attempts in this direction,8 the challenge has mostly proven to be too complex.

  Polythetic definitions have been useful in biology, where they have helped to overcome problems left behind by traditional, monothetic definitions of species. In such cases, however, even polythetic definitions have a monothetic core, since they presuppose a common evolutionary origin of species that are classified together. Social and personal phenomena such as meditation have no such monothetic core—no stable “essence,” if you like. Furthermore, while a definition of biological species is usually built on features that have what Rodney Needham calls “a real, distinct, and independent character,” definitions of social and personal phenomena “cannot be carried out by reference to discrete empirical particulars, but [entail] instead a reliance on further features of the same character which themselves are likewise polythetic.” The immense complexity of polythetic classification of social and personal phenomena may in the end render it impracticable, since “comparative studies, whether morphological or functional or statistical, are rendered more daunting and perhaps even unfeasible.”9

  There is no a priori reason to assume that social and personal phenomena such as meditation that lack the monothetic core displayed by species in biology are in themselves naturally divided into classes. More probably, they do not constitute natural taxa, and beyond the conceptualizations forced upon them by different languages in different ways, any classification will have artificial elements. The purpose of defining meditation, therefore, is not primarily to suggest a natural class of meditative phenomena but to establish a single point of reference to which comparative studies of meditation may usefully refer. Being more distinct and less fuzzy, a monothetic definition serves this purpose better than a polythetic one, which is indeed why some scholars have found it “reasonable to ask whether a definition of a [polythetic] concept is after all a definition, since it is certainly imprecise.”10

  In spite of accusations to the contrary, a precise generic definition can easily be combined with a keen awareness of the historical and cultural situatedness of natural language concepts and the social and personal realities to which such concepts refer, as well as with the ambiguities, family resemblances, overlaps, and gradient distinctions underlying both language and reality. Natural language concepts such as the English “meditation”—or, for that matter, the Arabic dhikr, the Sanskrit dhyāna, and the Chinese jìng-zuò—are multivalent, mutable, and fuzzy, and this is also the case with the social and personal phenomena to which they refer. However, these concepts and phenomena may all be fruitfully related to a monothetic definition of meditation, though they diverge from it in different ways. If, for instance, meditation is defined as a practice, the states of mind covered by the English “meditation” and the Sanskrit dhyāna fall outside the definition, and so do the philosophical and artistic products referred to by the English term. However, the recitation implied by the Arabic dhikr, the visualization implied by some Tantric uses of the Sanskrit dhyāna, and the seated posture implied by Chinese jìng-zuò restrict these terms to a much narrower range of practices than our general notion of meditation. In a comparative study of meditation, a monothetic definition provides us with a common focus, against which the peculiarities of each tradition may be highlighted.

  In an essay on the personal and social aspects of the Sufi practice of dhikr, Shahzad Bashir wrote, “Just as thinking about dhikr as meditation helps us understand the practice better, examining meditation in the light of presumptions coming from dhikr highlights meditation’s connection to modern forms of human subjectivity that are ingrained in the way we think and act but are not always easily visible…. Thinking about their similarities and differences provides an excellent venue to deepen our understanding of both.”11 Bashir refers to meditation “in its most commonsensical English meaning,” but his point is just as valid if we think of meditation as a monothetically defined technical term.

  A weak version of a generic definition would be merely stipulative, without deeper theoretical aspirations, with only the practical goal of providing common ground for the comparative treatment of related phenomena across cultures and languages. A stronger version of a generic definition is a theoretical definition, which not only has practical implications but also purports to link the defined notion to larger theoretical issues. As we have seen, defining meditation as a technique (not a state, and not a nontechnical form of practice) implies a certain theoretical view of meditation, as does the notion of meditation being attention-based (excluding automatized ritualistic practice) and practiced in order to achieve long-term inner transformation (and not just passing changes of state or changes that affect only the body). Such theoretical implications make a discussion of the definition into much more than a simple terminological question, touching as such a discussion does upon the nature of the phenomena to which the term in question refers.

  Technique

  According to our definition, all forms of meditation are “techniques.” A technique is a kind of practice that is deliberately undertaken, not simply taken for granted, unlike many of the everyday social practices typically studied by sociologists and anthropologists. A technique is systematic in the sense that its procedures are clearly specified, though this does not rule out spontaneous or even creative elements, as when random thoughts are made the object of meditation. It is continuous, meaning that the intentional activity undertaken is either durative (as when sustained attention is directed toward an image) or repetitive (as when a word or a sound combination is repeated over time), not sequential (as in the sequence of postures and movements involved in Hatha Yoga or Tài-jí, the nonrepeti
tive chanting of the entire Lotus Sūtra in Buddhism12 or the Book of Psalms in East Syrian Christianity,13 or the nondurative and nonrepetitive visualizations of the Gospels in Christianity or the imaginative space travels of Shàngqīng Daoism14). A technique is set aside from other activities in time, often also with regard to posture and location, and by means of specific rituals.15 And it is undertaken to achieve certain effects, to which we shall return below, and at least partly to do so indirectly by means of universal mechanisms inherent in the nature of the human body and mind.

  Many meditative traditions have an ambivalent relation to the technical aspects of meditation. For instance, meditative prayer and visualization are often explicitly content-oriented, devotional traditions focus on a personal relation to God, and apophatic practices typically emphasize the “unmediated” contact with the divine or the “direct” realization of ultimate truth. In all cases, this sometimes leads to a negative attitude toward the technicality of meditation. However, this does not mean that content-oriented, devotional, and apophatic practices are excluded from our definition, only that our emphasis is placed on their technical aspects, in contrast to the emphases of the traditions themselves.16