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Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds
A dizzying array of meditation practices have emerged in the long and culturally diverse history of Buddhism. Yet if you are seeking out meditation today in North America and Europe-and, increasingly, in the rest of the world as well-you will likely encounter one particular type, often under the label "mindfulness." You will find it taught in Zen monasteries, Insight Meditation centers, health clubs, colleges, psychologists' offices, corporations, liberal Christian churches, prisons, and the US military. Countless articles in popular magazines promote its benefits, often depicting it as a panacea for problems as wide-ranging as anxiety, depression, heart disease, eating disorders, and psoriasis. There are books on mindfulness and meditation not only by Buddhist monks but also by medical doctors, psychologists, computer engineers, business consultants, and a US congressman. Meditation teachers will sometimes say that this is the same meditative practice that the Buddha taught over 2500 years ago, and which has been transmitted virtually unchanged down through the centuries to us today. The "cultural baggage" surrounding the practices has changed, but the essence is intact, and what it does for people, whether you're a Buddhist monk or a corporate executive, remains the same.Rethinking Meditation shows that the standard articulation of mindfulness did not come down to us unchanged from the time of the Buddha. Rather, it is a distillation of particular strands of Buddhist thought that have combined with western ideas to create a unique practice tailored to modern life. Rethinking Meditation argues that the relationship between meditative practices and cultural context is much more crucial than is suggested in typical contemporary articulations.David McMahan shows that most of the vast array of meditative practices that have emerged in Buddhist traditions have been filtered out of typical contemporary practice, allowing only a trickle of meditative practices through. This book presents a genealogy of some specific elements in classical Buddhist traditions that have fed into contemporary meditative practices-those that have made it through the filters of modernity. It out of the many forms of Buddhist meditation that have developed over two-and-a-half millennia, how and why were particular practices selected to coalesce into the Standard Version today?
258 pages, Kindle Edition
Published March 17, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
October 10, 2023
Девід продовжує свою працю із дослідження медитації, буддійського модернізму і в діалозі із наукою. Варто перекласти українською..
August 23, 2023
It is hard to know how to even begin to review of a book of the beauty, depth, nuance, and complexity of David McMahan’s excellent Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds. McMahan’s previous book—his seminal The Making of Buddhist Modernism—is undeniably the most important book about Buddhist modernism written in this century, and Rethinking Meditation is destined to take its place alongside it as an indispensable classic.
Rethinking Meditation is really two books in one. The first half of the book dismantles the myth that the Buddhist meditation we practice today is the timeless practice handed down from the Buddha. McMahan demonstrates how every culture and historical era reinterprets and repurposes Buddhist practice to make it relevant to its place and time. Every culture and era has “filters” and “magnets” that de-emphasize some aspects of the Buddhist tradition while amplifying others. Thus, modern Western meditators filter out classical Buddhist themes that are incongruous with late modern Western culture (e.g. rebirth, the foulness of the body) and emphasize themes that are culture-congruent and relevant to the moment (e.g. interdependence, secular re-enchantment, savoring the moment). As a result the ways in which an Indian Buddhist monk in 200 B.C. understood meditation and the purposes to which he put it, and those of an American “convert” Buddhist in 2023 are remarkably different. For example, the ancient Indian monk contemplated the foulness of the body—how it was filled with phlegm, pus, and bile—and engaged in charnel ground meditations to watch bodies decompose in order to disenchant himself with and disidentify himself from his body. Modern mindfulness meditators, on the other hand, engage in the body scan to experience the body more fully, to re-inhabit and become more intimate with it, and live a fully embodied life.
McMahan also dismantles the idea that meditation is like a “science of mind” that enables practitioners to objectively discover the “way things really are”— the true, unchanging nature of reality. McMahan describes how the various mental maps offered by the different schools of Buddhism help shape and limit the kinds of insights practitioners are likely to discover through meditation. These maps include the Abhidharma lists of mental states, the eight jhanas, and innatist views on uncovering/actualizing an already existent Buddha-nature. It makes a great deal of difference whether one thinks one becomes a Buddha through developing and embodying certain views, mental states, attitudes, and competencies (e.g. the paramitas and brahma-viharas) or whether one views enlightenment as an uncovering and realization of the Buddha one already is. McMahan is nuanced here, however, and also raises the possibility that meditation also has a deconstructive potential to liberate thinking from pre-established categories—the possibility suggested by Nagarjuna’s tetralemma and Zen’s admonition to go beyond “words and letters.” Thus different strands of the Buddhist tradition both constrain and liberate discovery. What meditation will show you depends on how you think about meditation. But even when meditation encourages us to transcend our categories, we are all still limited by our social imaginaries, our conditioning, our mental habits, and the constraining visions of our traditions.
.
In the final part of his book, McMahan explores three aspects of late modern culture that strongly affect contemporary understanding of meditation and Buddhist practice: the ethics of appreciation, authenticity, and autonomy. We can understand how the value of appreciation affects modern Buddhism when we consider how mindfulness meditation is oriented towards discovering the pleasures of embodiment, the savoring of the tastes of food, “stopping to smell the roses,” and discovering new satisfactions in mundane repetitive tasks such as doing the laundry. We see it also reflected in the title of Maezumi Roshi’s book, Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice. This ethic of appreciation is not something we find in early Indian Buddhism but it characterizes a good deal of modern Buddhism in East Asia and the West.
The ethic of authenticity is reflected in the idea that we have an authentic self (as opposed to a socially-conditioned self) that needs to be uncovered, actualized, and expressed. We see this ethic reflected in the idea that meditation involves “going within” to discover one’s genuine self. Of course, early Indian Buddhism insisted there was no such thing as an essential or unchanging self.
The ethic of autonomy involves what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “buffered” self—a self that is self-determining and individuated from family and culture—an independent rational observer in control of his or her appetites and desires and able remain unperturbed by untoward life circumstances. We see this reflected in the idea that meditation builds inner Imperturbability and peace regardless of external circumstances, and that we are responsible for our own happiness.
McMahan suggests we replace the idea of the autonomous self with “situated autonomy”—the acknowledgement of our social embeddedness and the simultaneous acknowledgment that practices like meditation can enhance our agency through increasing our awareness of possibilities. McMahan points out there are aspects of the Buddhist tradition that mitigate against this autonomous self. The inner citadel model of the self is in conflict with late modern perspectives on the plural, contingent, dialogical, and interdependent nature of selves—perspectives that dovetail with traditional Buddhist views on non-self, dependent origination, and emptiness. The interdependent self introduces the possibility of an ethical responsibility towards all beings and towards the natural environment that mitigates against the individualized buffered self. This leads to an Engaged Buddhism that is not just about feeling good but doing good—and doing good in ways that undermine systemic forms of privilege and oppression. But nuanced as always, McMahan points out that this new Buddhist interdependence is a modern secularized variant aiming at a better world in this life rather than the next or though transcending the world altogether.
Rethinking Meditation is a book you will want to have on your bookshelf. It is beautifully written and will help you think more clearly about how meditation is inevitably affected by historical, social, and cultural contexts.
Rethinking Meditation is really two books in one. The first half of the book dismantles the myth that the Buddhist meditation we practice today is the timeless practice handed down from the Buddha. McMahan demonstrates how every culture and historical era reinterprets and repurposes Buddhist practice to make it relevant to its place and time. Every culture and era has “filters” and “magnets” that de-emphasize some aspects of the Buddhist tradition while amplifying others. Thus, modern Western meditators filter out classical Buddhist themes that are incongruous with late modern Western culture (e.g. rebirth, the foulness of the body) and emphasize themes that are culture-congruent and relevant to the moment (e.g. interdependence, secular re-enchantment, savoring the moment). As a result the ways in which an Indian Buddhist monk in 200 B.C. understood meditation and the purposes to which he put it, and those of an American “convert” Buddhist in 2023 are remarkably different. For example, the ancient Indian monk contemplated the foulness of the body—how it was filled with phlegm, pus, and bile—and engaged in charnel ground meditations to watch bodies decompose in order to disenchant himself with and disidentify himself from his body. Modern mindfulness meditators, on the other hand, engage in the body scan to experience the body more fully, to re-inhabit and become more intimate with it, and live a fully embodied life.
McMahan also dismantles the idea that meditation is like a “science of mind” that enables practitioners to objectively discover the “way things really are”— the true, unchanging nature of reality. McMahan describes how the various mental maps offered by the different schools of Buddhism help shape and limit the kinds of insights practitioners are likely to discover through meditation. These maps include the Abhidharma lists of mental states, the eight jhanas, and innatist views on uncovering/actualizing an already existent Buddha-nature. It makes a great deal of difference whether one thinks one becomes a Buddha through developing and embodying certain views, mental states, attitudes, and competencies (e.g. the paramitas and brahma-viharas) or whether one views enlightenment as an uncovering and realization of the Buddha one already is. McMahan is nuanced here, however, and also raises the possibility that meditation also has a deconstructive potential to liberate thinking from pre-established categories—the possibility suggested by Nagarjuna’s tetralemma and Zen’s admonition to go beyond “words and letters.” Thus different strands of the Buddhist tradition both constrain and liberate discovery. What meditation will show you depends on how you think about meditation. But even when meditation encourages us to transcend our categories, we are all still limited by our social imaginaries, our conditioning, our mental habits, and the constraining visions of our traditions.
.
In the final part of his book, McMahan explores three aspects of late modern culture that strongly affect contemporary understanding of meditation and Buddhist practice: the ethics of appreciation, authenticity, and autonomy. We can understand how the value of appreciation affects modern Buddhism when we consider how mindfulness meditation is oriented towards discovering the pleasures of embodiment, the savoring of the tastes of food, “stopping to smell the roses,” and discovering new satisfactions in mundane repetitive tasks such as doing the laundry. We see it also reflected in the title of Maezumi Roshi’s book, Appreciate Your Life: The Essence of Zen Practice. This ethic of appreciation is not something we find in early Indian Buddhism but it characterizes a good deal of modern Buddhism in East Asia and the West.
The ethic of authenticity is reflected in the idea that we have an authentic self (as opposed to a socially-conditioned self) that needs to be uncovered, actualized, and expressed. We see this ethic reflected in the idea that meditation involves “going within” to discover one’s genuine self. Of course, early Indian Buddhism insisted there was no such thing as an essential or unchanging self.
The ethic of autonomy involves what philosopher Charles Taylor calls the “buffered” self—a self that is self-determining and individuated from family and culture—an independent rational observer in control of his or her appetites and desires and able remain unperturbed by untoward life circumstances. We see this reflected in the idea that meditation builds inner Imperturbability and peace regardless of external circumstances, and that we are responsible for our own happiness.
McMahan suggests we replace the idea of the autonomous self with “situated autonomy”—the acknowledgement of our social embeddedness and the simultaneous acknowledgment that practices like meditation can enhance our agency through increasing our awareness of possibilities. McMahan points out there are aspects of the Buddhist tradition that mitigate against this autonomous self. The inner citadel model of the self is in conflict with late modern perspectives on the plural, contingent, dialogical, and interdependent nature of selves—perspectives that dovetail with traditional Buddhist views on non-self, dependent origination, and emptiness. The interdependent self introduces the possibility of an ethical responsibility towards all beings and towards the natural environment that mitigates against the individualized buffered self. This leads to an Engaged Buddhism that is not just about feeling good but doing good—and doing good in ways that undermine systemic forms of privilege and oppression. But nuanced as always, McMahan points out that this new Buddhist interdependence is a modern secularized variant aiming at a better world in this life rather than the next or though transcending the world altogether.
Rethinking Meditation is a book you will want to have on your bookshelf. It is beautifully written and will help you think more clearly about how meditation is inevitably affected by historical, social, and cultural contexts.
May 18, 2024
I love this book. Gave it the highest rating possible. There are, however, regular grammatical and typographical errors in the text, which are occasionally off-putting, and sometimes confusing.
Obviously the proofreading errors in Rethinking Meditation (RM) did not result in me downrating the book, due to the fact that that RM had a profound influence on my perspective and practice of meditation.
Will it do the same for you? Maybe. It is impossible to know. You may inhabit a social, cultural, intellectual, or interior world that makes this particular book boring, or somehow impenetrable to you.
It is a wonder that authors can write and publish any works of literature that connect with enough people to provide them with a decent living (wait, is that why . . .?). We all live in different worlds- our lives are shaped by many peculiarly specific and unrepeatable influences. In addition, as human beings we seem hell-bent on having our likes and dislikes firmly established and ready to be defended against all comers. It is a miracle we should agree on anything.
Because THAT is the overarching point that David McMahan seems to be making in RM, with precision, clarity, and readability.
RM explores two significant hypotheses. The first is that the modern Standard Model of meditation (often but not always referred to as "mindfulness training") that some of us thought came down in pristine original condition all the way from the living Buddha himself, did not.
What we currently practice in the West and the East, and all the other points of the globe has been filtered through a mind bending plethora of historical, cultural, social, linguistic and personal perspectives to serve an equally wide variety of agendas. It is a miracle that the Standard Model works as intended by the Tathagata. Wait, does it? How do we know?
An example of the above is the famous story of a guy hanging from the branch of a sapling attached to a cliff face. The branch is steadily being gnawed on by two mice. A tiger prowls the rim of the cliff face above him and below, another tiger sits on its haunches observing our hero's predicament with a great deal of hungry attention. Both cats cannot wait to devour the poor fellow. Presently he spots a strawberry hanging from a bush, all big and red and delectable and within reach. He plucks it, takes a bite and exclaims, "Oh! How sweet!"
McMahan then takes us on a tour of the origin of this Koan, how it originally served as a cautionary tale about distractions and pitfalls (yes, the strawberry, and the tigers, too, represent distractions) and of the world travels and linguistic transformations the koan took until it gradually morphed into a kind of Aesop’s fable about enjoying the pleasures of life in the present moment.
Is either interpretation correct? I'm guessing that your Rinzai Zen teacher would ring you out of dokusan for trying on either interpretation, but I am only guessing, after all, and anyway, we aren't talking about passing that gate. McMahan is simply following the travels and transformations of the popular forms that this spiritual fable has taken through the years. In doing so, he heightens our awareness of how much we, and sometimes the very setting in which we meditate, assumes about what purposes meditation serves.
The second general project of this book is McMahan's effort to elucidate three aspects of late modern culture that have had considerable influence upon the assumptive world of meditators in the West and on their practice of meditation.
Those influences are the ethics of authenticity (often seen as finding and living in harmony with our true nature, as opposed to that which society has foisted upon us), the ethic of autonomy (seen as freedom or self-agency), and the ethic of appreciation (often seen as learning to attend to and value the good that life offers).
To these three he adds a fourth ethic (read the term "ethic" here to mean a way to live and guide one's conduct, not necessarily a decision-making process for navigating difficult circumstances). That fourth ethic is the ethic of interdependence (living with the awareness that we are and always have been part of a web of reciprocal relationships that offer us resources, and which require certain loyalties).
Autonomy, appreciation, and authenticity represent three influential quests that have shaped Westen world views in modern times. McMahan does an impressive job of showing how Western culture has privileged each of the first three ethics in modern discourse. Through art and literature, self-help books, philosophy texts, political manifestos, and in university courses, impressionable young minds have been persuaded that autonomy, appreciation and/or authenticity represent the sine qua non of the good life.
They are the highest values on offer in our world.
The ethic of interdependence has placed a distant fourth in the race for most influential value, but has been gaining ground lately, largely due to the influence of Buddhist world views. In McMahan's parlance, these values often served as "magnets," drawing our attention to Buddhist teachings that seem to emphasize the possibility of achieving these ideals.
In RM, McMahan's scholarship is deliberate, careful, well-articulated. He avoids the error of over-generalization while pointing out the ways in which enlightenment and post enlightenment ideals have interacted with Buddhist world views coming to the West. In the process, these interactions have reshaped the way Westerners have tended to experience Buddhist meditation.
What I love most about this book's approach to meditation is that it dares to take up the same lens that the Buddhist sutras encourage meditators to use with regard to their individual assumptive worlds. Using that same lens, the author takes one further step back from the process in order to reflect upon the Buddhist setting itself, the whole panoply of architecture, liturgy, chanting, history, languages, private instruction, canonical texts and non canonical literature.
The author makes an effective argument for understanding that Buddhist meditation's assumptive worlds are themselves conditioned, like everything else in this world in which we live.
In other words, no one "just sits" (with all due apologies to my Soto Zen friends and mentors). Sitting takes place in a highly liturgical and architectural environment that sets specific psychological conditions for the sitting. In turn this environment with its appointments and accessories reinforces certain ideas. These and other mental formulations are communicated through the posture one is instructed to take and is buttressed by chanting sutras that convey specific expectations and viewpoints reinforced by the whole mechanism. That doesn't make the viewpoints themselves wrong, but it does make them fair game for examination and deliberation, especially if one is seeking to sit in the spirit of certain sayings attributed to the Buddha himself.
In sum, I really love this altogether challenging book. McMahan has succeeded in fulfilling the spirit of many of the sayings attributed to the Buddha and his disciples down through the ages that encourage practitioners to pay attention to what is happening in them and around them. In that sense, I would say that RM achieves the goal of one of the seven factors of enlightenment elucidated in the Sattipatthana Sutta- the investigation of dhammas. Great wisdom arises!
Obviously the proofreading errors in Rethinking Meditation (RM) did not result in me downrating the book, due to the fact that that RM had a profound influence on my perspective and practice of meditation.
Will it do the same for you? Maybe. It is impossible to know. You may inhabit a social, cultural, intellectual, or interior world that makes this particular book boring, or somehow impenetrable to you.
It is a wonder that authors can write and publish any works of literature that connect with enough people to provide them with a decent living (wait, is that why . . .?). We all live in different worlds- our lives are shaped by many peculiarly specific and unrepeatable influences. In addition, as human beings we seem hell-bent on having our likes and dislikes firmly established and ready to be defended against all comers. It is a miracle we should agree on anything.
Because THAT is the overarching point that David McMahan seems to be making in RM, with precision, clarity, and readability.
RM explores two significant hypotheses. The first is that the modern Standard Model of meditation (often but not always referred to as "mindfulness training") that some of us thought came down in pristine original condition all the way from the living Buddha himself, did not.
What we currently practice in the West and the East, and all the other points of the globe has been filtered through a mind bending plethora of historical, cultural, social, linguistic and personal perspectives to serve an equally wide variety of agendas. It is a miracle that the Standard Model works as intended by the Tathagata. Wait, does it? How do we know?
An example of the above is the famous story of a guy hanging from the branch of a sapling attached to a cliff face. The branch is steadily being gnawed on by two mice. A tiger prowls the rim of the cliff face above him and below, another tiger sits on its haunches observing our hero's predicament with a great deal of hungry attention. Both cats cannot wait to devour the poor fellow. Presently he spots a strawberry hanging from a bush, all big and red and delectable and within reach. He plucks it, takes a bite and exclaims, "Oh! How sweet!"
McMahan then takes us on a tour of the origin of this Koan, how it originally served as a cautionary tale about distractions and pitfalls (yes, the strawberry, and the tigers, too, represent distractions) and of the world travels and linguistic transformations the koan took until it gradually morphed into a kind of Aesop’s fable about enjoying the pleasures of life in the present moment.
Is either interpretation correct? I'm guessing that your Rinzai Zen teacher would ring you out of dokusan for trying on either interpretation, but I am only guessing, after all, and anyway, we aren't talking about passing that gate. McMahan is simply following the travels and transformations of the popular forms that this spiritual fable has taken through the years. In doing so, he heightens our awareness of how much we, and sometimes the very setting in which we meditate, assumes about what purposes meditation serves.
The second general project of this book is McMahan's effort to elucidate three aspects of late modern culture that have had considerable influence upon the assumptive world of meditators in the West and on their practice of meditation.
Those influences are the ethics of authenticity (often seen as finding and living in harmony with our true nature, as opposed to that which society has foisted upon us), the ethic of autonomy (seen as freedom or self-agency), and the ethic of appreciation (often seen as learning to attend to and value the good that life offers).
To these three he adds a fourth ethic (read the term "ethic" here to mean a way to live and guide one's conduct, not necessarily a decision-making process for navigating difficult circumstances). That fourth ethic is the ethic of interdependence (living with the awareness that we are and always have been part of a web of reciprocal relationships that offer us resources, and which require certain loyalties).
Autonomy, appreciation, and authenticity represent three influential quests that have shaped Westen world views in modern times. McMahan does an impressive job of showing how Western culture has privileged each of the first three ethics in modern discourse. Through art and literature, self-help books, philosophy texts, political manifestos, and in university courses, impressionable young minds have been persuaded that autonomy, appreciation and/or authenticity represent the sine qua non of the good life.
They are the highest values on offer in our world.
The ethic of interdependence has placed a distant fourth in the race for most influential value, but has been gaining ground lately, largely due to the influence of Buddhist world views. In McMahan's parlance, these values often served as "magnets," drawing our attention to Buddhist teachings that seem to emphasize the possibility of achieving these ideals.
In RM, McMahan's scholarship is deliberate, careful, well-articulated. He avoids the error of over-generalization while pointing out the ways in which enlightenment and post enlightenment ideals have interacted with Buddhist world views coming to the West. In the process, these interactions have reshaped the way Westerners have tended to experience Buddhist meditation.
What I love most about this book's approach to meditation is that it dares to take up the same lens that the Buddhist sutras encourage meditators to use with regard to their individual assumptive worlds. Using that same lens, the author takes one further step back from the process in order to reflect upon the Buddhist setting itself, the whole panoply of architecture, liturgy, chanting, history, languages, private instruction, canonical texts and non canonical literature.
The author makes an effective argument for understanding that Buddhist meditation's assumptive worlds are themselves conditioned, like everything else in this world in which we live.
In other words, no one "just sits" (with all due apologies to my Soto Zen friends and mentors). Sitting takes place in a highly liturgical and architectural environment that sets specific psychological conditions for the sitting. In turn this environment with its appointments and accessories reinforces certain ideas. These and other mental formulations are communicated through the posture one is instructed to take and is buttressed by chanting sutras that convey specific expectations and viewpoints reinforced by the whole mechanism. That doesn't make the viewpoints themselves wrong, but it does make them fair game for examination and deliberation, especially if one is seeking to sit in the spirit of certain sayings attributed to the Buddha himself.
In sum, I really love this altogether challenging book. McMahan has succeeded in fulfilling the spirit of many of the sayings attributed to the Buddha and his disciples down through the ages that encourage practitioners to pay attention to what is happening in them and around them. In that sense, I would say that RM achieves the goal of one of the seven factors of enlightenment elucidated in the Sattipatthana Sutta- the investigation of dhammas. Great wisdom arises!
November 12, 2023
“I quite liked it I’m not gonna lie. It sparked my interest in reading other books on Buddhist tradition and I think McMahan has a good way of getting down his thoughts in an understandable way.
Low key gave me like a little bit of a like crisis. I’m interested in reading more on Buddhist theories about emptiness.”
-Mia
Low key gave me like a little bit of a like crisis. I’m interested in reading more on Buddhist theories about emptiness.”
-Mia
December 12, 2024
an absolute must read for anyone interested in buddhist thought and meditation
December 15, 2025
“Meditation cannot make any sense without a rich surrounding context of ideas, social practices, cultural orientations, and ethical commitments.”
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews