Thinking in and about Meditation

RETHINKING MEDITATION: BUDDHIST MEDITATIVE PRACTICES IN ANCIENT AND MODERN WORLDSBy David L. McMahan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023Pp. 264. 29. 95 (hardcover). We are lucky to read David McMahan's Rethinking Meditation in the context of his seminal The Making of Buddhist Modernism (McMahan, 2008), which clarified how contemporary Buddhism and modernism cocreate each other. While the earlier book opened up a new field of inquiry in Buddhist studies, Rethinking Meditation examines something the field has perhaps already seen but not adequately appreciated. Both forms of scholarship are vital. In these two cases, they are also brilliantly accomplished. This book distinguishes itself from its scholarly peers (including the earlier book) by being directly, and I believe intentionally, accessible to readers outside of Buddhist studies. The Making of Buddhist Modernism attempted to reevaluate the existence and the agency of Buddhism in the context of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In part, that new evaluation dealt with the relationship between Buddhist meditation; Buddhist canonical texts; contemporary views of so-called "mindfulness" and, more largely, psychological awareness; and how and whether Buddhism should integrate the latter two discourses. McMahan's last two chapters in The Making of Buddhist Modernism open out onto the subject of this book, which simultaneously returns to deeper Buddhist historical roots and unfolds possible new Buddhist shoots. Though remaining a scholar at some distance from the tradition, McMahan has his values and (though always sotto voce) promotes them to Buddhism's and our good. While this book will stimulate and edify scholars of Buddhism, I experience it as consciously intended for a wider audience, not just of scholars but of practitioners. McMahan encourages his/our/the flock but does not put them off with references and footnotes. This accessibility matters because, as Buddhist practitioners and scholars outside of Buddhist studies become increasingly aware of the breadth of Buddhist meditative traditions, they may also find new ways of applying those traditions to processes of social change. In my reading, McMahan cares about this: he imagines scholarship transforming traditions—not accidentally, but purposefully. McMahan himself describes his book as beginning not only in the "conglomeration of disciplines that make up Religious Studies" but also in something larger, "resonating with certain elements of Buddhist thought itself—indeed, of meditative inquiry" (18). This is a postmodern project, even if McMahan seems wisely to avoid that divisive word. He sees contemporary meditation not only in the context of modern (and Protestant-influenced) secularism but also as a "destabilization of that very discourse, and the bending of it toward the possibility of a kind of secular re-enchantment of the world" (21). The book's title matters and may indeed be intentionally provocative, as, in the context of meditation, its first word, "rethinking, " may sound heretical to many Buddhist ears. In framing his reassessment, McMahan invokes a litany of Western classics, perhaps most importantly Nyanaponika Thera's The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, (Weiser, 2014 1962), a seminal distillation of vipassanā for laypersons. But Nyanaponika and others McMahan calls forth might bewail that "McMahan goes astray with his very first word!" Nyanaponika (quite traditionally) asserts that the point of meditation is to avoid thinking (let alone rethinking!). McMahan, in this work, argues that an honest assessment of meditation admits that thinking has always been integral to meditation, allowing it to connect to—and even change—culture. This connection between thinking and cultural change matters to this book and to Buddhist history. Rethinking Meditation unfolds in three parts. The first, "Thinking about Meditation, " contains chapters approaching meditation as much as possible from outside any one culture, considering meditative practice and reflection as brain practice. This first part of the book, particularly chapter two, "Neural Maps and Enlightenment Machines, " is fundamental to the book in the sense of scholarship and history, but very clearly does not reflect McMahan's intellectual commitments. The book's second part, "Meditation in Context, " reexamines meditation in two chapters focusing on the defined shape of meditation in Pali culture and two more examining the amorphous shape of meditation outside Pali culture but still within other cultural contexts (leaning naturally on McMahan's decades of work on Mahāyāna Buddhism). The book's third part, "Meditation and the Ethical Subject, " sets meditation firmly in the context of modernity. While McMahan's training lies more in the first two parts, the heart of his effort here lies in the third, which (in my view) provides his most significant contributions to Buddhist practice and scholarship. McMahan begins by outlining a dominant "Standard Version" of meditation "worthy of historical, cultural, and philosophical investigation" (6). However, he finds that this supposedly standard version ignores the fundamental fact that meditation has always already been embedded in cultural contexts. All cultures employ filters rejecting unappealing practices as well as magnets attracting alluring practices. Part of the "aim in this book is to provide examples of such filters and magnets that created the conditions for the development of Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditative practices as popular practices of self-transformation" (12) here in the West. Thus, the book is not an exhaustive history and exploration of Buddhist meditation but an analysis of recent meditation shaped by our (modern, Western) filters and magnets. If I had to specify Rethinking Meditation's primary aim, I would say is not critique as much as exploration. McMahan sees contemporary meditation as "adapted to the post-Enlightenment view of the autonomous individual for whom being with others, being in society, and living in concert with social norms is considered a potential imposition on the individual's freedom" (15). Yet meditation is not just about minds and brains apart from society, but "about the work meditation does in particular social contexts. " (16) Crucially, this is value-laden work that both cultivates and dismantles social structures, "calling into question accepted truths, interrogating tacit assumptions, reconfiguring affective habits" (16). "Thinking about Meditation" addresses the view of meditation as brain science conducted within the "theater-of-the-mind, " aside from culture. McMahan describes but rejects this view, though not without appreciating the insights it provides. He admits that if meditation must exist within cultural contexts, this must result in a traceable, historical tradition. Part two, "Meditation in Context, " explores that tradition. After reading that second part's sixty-some pages, I feel the impossibility of ever again entertaining the notion, so common within Buddhist practice (and even Buddhist studies), that meditation grows from an inner reality potentially free from social influences. As a Buddhist studies scholar, I have long been critical of the idea of such a romanticized, free-floating perspective. Still, as a practitioner, I admit I have also long been enamored of that idealization. Rethinking Meditation will convince anyone but a pure idealist to let go of that fantasy. Having said that, this leaves us with new questions. If meditation is not simply a method for coming to objective internal truths, how do we conceive of the insights that practitioners claim to have? And, if it does not lead to a kind of transcultural freedom "that allows one to extract the mind from external influence and cultural conditioning and unleash … a purely self-generated autonomy, is there another way to conceive of their emancipatory potentials? " (123). If meditation cannot float above cultures, it must respond to cultures; indeed, it must be in some way a creation of cultures. This being so, we should attend to these creation stories, as such attention may give us greater power to reshape those stories and cultures. This is the focus and the imperative of the book's third part, "Meditation and the Ethical Subject. " As I earlier suggested, in my view the most outstanding contributions of Rethinking Meditation might be generative not merely of new scholarship but of new practices. The book's third part moves us (wherever we are on the Buddhist-non-Buddhist and scholar–practitioner spectra) to reconsider our assumptions about meditation. Though McMahan never makes this injunction explicit, the book demands it, as such reconsideration naturally follows from the expansive and detailed central argument that precedes it. McMahan sees meditation in the context of a (perhaps wonderfully) fragmented modern, secular culture. How has and how shall meditation be shaped by and contribute to that secular culture? Not having space to reproduce the book's detailed analysis, I can at least say that the book carefully identifies and delineates how we might answer those questions by developing ethics of appreciation, authenticity, autonomy, and, ultimately, interdependence. must engage conceptual thinking, apply particular values and judgments (or "discernments"), and make explicit one's implicit assumptions and attitudes. This approach might still be "secular" in the limited sense of "this-worldly, " but it does not reproduce the implicit ideology of neutrality, the presumption of a thoroughly unbiased "view from nowhere" to which the secular gaze aspires. (197) takes the raw ingredients of secular cosmology and infuses them with wonder …. His unbuffering of secular subjectivity invites in no demons or gods or voices from other worlds. Just clouds, paper, roses, garbage, stars, planets, and each other. (213–214) All books have limitations. Since this book invokes Pierre Bourdieu's work on habitus, I wish it had incorporated David Preston's (and my own) previous analyses of how habitus can help us understand meditative practice. I think the book would have been more powerful with edits in some sections. I would have appreciated a wider net, bringing in more of the multiplicity of Mahāyāna views of meditation, views McMahan deeply understands and has previously engaged. But, honestly, no author can have read everything, and assuredly, no author should incorporate everything. We live in a practical world in which we must focus our attention, even within scholarly books. I hope it is clear that these small critiques are nothing in comparison with my appreciation for this book's capacity to make all of us (re) think. The practices we have been examining are among the many bequeathed to us by the dead and magnetically drawn to the world of the living, called forth by urgency as much as longing for quietude. And we shall see whether Iron-Age tools are able not only to bring personal calm but also to contribute to the transformation of the Anthropocene into a more livable age. (219) Those words go beyond this review's scope to explicate, but they convey McMahan's sense that, with the help of meditation, we can engage our world actively and creatively, that we can use ancient tools to bridge the modern gap between inner and outer, that we can recreate our practice as social, and that we can make our world better. Scholars across the disciplines of religious studies, particularly those outside of Buddhist studies, will gain greatly from reading this book. I encourage teachers in the next few years to employ it as a core text in courses on meditation in general, as well as in courses in Buddhist studies. And I do hope that practitioners will read and allow themselves to truly encounter this book and the liberative potentials it finds within meditation. While remaining scholarly, Rethinking Meditation reminds us how expansive the Buddhist world is. In this, it becomes not merely an explication of Buddhism, but an inspiration for what Buddhism can be.