David McMahan, PhD, Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies, Franklin & Marshall University.
The scientific study of Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditative practices often contains certain implicit views of the human being (anthropologies), along with associated views of what, exactly, meditation does or what the meditator comes to know (epistemologies). One view of the human being, derived from the European Enlightenment, is that of the free, autonomous subject who can be trained to neutralize his or her biases, presuppositions, and cultural conditioning to attain a kind of judgment-free access to the raw data of the mind. The second view is of the human being as essentially identical with the brain and its functions. Both of these perspectives tend to neglect the crucial role of context and social existence. Rather than seeing meditation primarily in terms of private interior mental states that can be mapped in neural imaging technologies, meditation might be better understood as an array of practices involving the cultivation of attitudes, ethical orientations, values, judgments, strategies, and behaviors grounded in particular cultures’ repertoires of possible ways of being in the world.
360 Video Login required