Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds

avid McMahan has once again presented a work that is likely to become a landmark.In his previous and persuasive The Making of Buddhist Modernism, McMahan demonstrated that today's popular understanding of the term "Buddhism" is indebted to certain dominant cultural and intellectual dynamics of modernity.In Rethinking Meditation, McMahan extends this analysis to meditation and mindfulness.In this analysis he considers the history of Buddhist ideas and concepts that continue to influence popular understanding, as well as social and cultural factors-in particular the role of modern, secular, and elitist/transnational culture-in shaping current forms of meditation.Like its predecessor, Rethinking Meditation challenges a variety of common assumptions and beliefs.In particular, it debunks the myth that meditation is a timeless practice passed down directly from the Buddha.Moreover, it dispels the notion of meditation as a science of the mind that enables practitioners to objectively discover something like the true, unchanging nature of reality.Instead, the book shows how different cultures and historical periods have reinterpreted and adapted Buddhist practices to make them culturally and temporally relevant, and how different mental maps within Buddhist schools influence the insights practitioners can gain through meditation.By lifting the veils of essentialist and universalist thinking, McMahan portrays Buddhist meditation as an adaptable practice situated within social and cultural contexts, from which it draws categories, concepts, and values, some of which it adopts, and others of which it rejects.Emphasizing the situatedness of meditation and underscoring the importance of context, the book serves a dual purpose: it takes its readers on a fascinating expedition through numerous historical and cultural facets of meditation and acts as a refreshing wake-up call to reconsider presumed certainties about the mind.The book's approximately 250 pages begin from the religious-historical assertion that, in the development of what we today call "Buddhism," a nearly incomprehensible variety and diversity of practices have formed, which we now summarize under the term "meditation."Buddhists carry out such practices worldwide in many contexts, however those contexts do not embody those practices' historical abundance, nor offer a representative cross-section of their diversity over time.The focus of Rethinking Meditation is on the evolution and selection of meditative practices and their adaptation to recent, and especially so-called "Western," contexts.