David L. McMahan

David L. McMahan, PhD, is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He is the co-editor of Buddhism, Meditation and Science (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), editor of Buddhism in the Modern World (Routledge 2012) and author of The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2008), Empty Vision: Metaphor and Visionary Imagery in Mahāyāna Buddhism (Routledge Curzon, 2002), and several articles on Mahāyāna Buddhism in South Asia and Buddhism in the modern world.
He has written on Indian Buddhist literature, visual metaphors and practice, and the early history of the Mahāyāna movement in India.  More recently, his work has focused on the interface of Buddhism and modernity, including its interactions with science, psychology, modernist literature, romanticism, and transcendentalism.  He is currently researching the various ways that Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditation is understood and practiced in different cultural and historical contexts, ancient and modern.