Eifring Halvor - Asian Traditions of Meditation

1. 1 What Is Meditation?
   HALVOR EIFRING
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Meditative practices have flourished since the founding of the great civilizations in Eurasia. For the first time, this volume brings together studies of the major traditions of Asian meditation, including Yoga, Tantra, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, as well as modern secular and scientific approaches to meditation.

Few if any scholarly attempts have been made at cross-cultural comparison of meditative practices. This is in contrast to the cross-cultural study of mystical experience that has been thoroughly addressed in the debates pitting the constructivist approach of Steven T. Katz against the perennial approach of Robert K. C. Forman. It is also in contrast to the comparative issues raised in scientific rather than cultural studies of meditation, as in Maria Ospina et al.s impressive report Meditation Practices for Health: State of the Research. Finally, while scholarly studies of meditation have tended to shy away from cross-cultural comparison, more popular works seldom have the same qualms, including Claudio Naranjo and Robert E. Ornsteins On the Psychology of Meditation and Daniel Golemans The Meditative Mind, both of which were first published in the 1970s, as well as Livia Kohns more recent Meditation Works.

Scholars studying meditation have typically stayed within one specific tradition and stuck to culture-specific modes of explanation with limited general relevance. This includes excellent monographs, such as Sarah Shaws Buddhist Meditation, Isabelle Robinets Taoist Meditation, and Rodney L. Taylors The Confucian Way of Contemplation. To the extent that scholars have ventured beyond the bounds of a single tradition, they have mostly limited themselves to traditions that are historically related, as in Geoffrey Samuels The Origins of Yoga and Tantra. Scholars have usually avoided the comparison of traditions that have no obvious historical relation but may have generic features in common or may, for that matter, differ from each other in interesting ways.

This collection of essays brings together different Asian traditions and compares them not only with each other but also with the traditions studied in another recent volume I edited, Meditation in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In addition to delving deeply into the individual traditions, this book places each tradition in a global perspective, looking at both historical and generic connections between meditative practices from different historical periods and different parts of the Eurasian continent.

The aim of this book is twofold. On the one hand, it seeks to identify the cultural and historical peculiarities of various Asian schools of meditation, both for their own sake and as a basis for further comparison. On the other hand, it seeks to identify basic features of meditative practices across cultures, and x thereby to take a first step toward a framework for the comparative study of meditation.

Asian forms of meditation have two main historical sources: Indian and Chinese. In the course of their development, both forms have ventured far beyond their places of origin to eventually cover most of Asia. They have also mixed with one another, and with meditative, devotional, ritual, and shamanistic practices in the various localities to which they have traveled. More recently, they have become global phenomena on a larger scale, and have exerted substantial influence on the cultures of America, Europe, Australia, and other parts of the world, often in combination with Western medicine, physical exercise, psychotherapy, and various forms of modern spirituality. The resulting practices have in turn exerted an equally substantial influence on Asian meditation.

The notion of Asian traditions of meditation is in contrast to the Judaic, Christian, Islamic, and ancient Greco-Roman traditions stemming from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. There is no absolute line of division between the two. For instance, it has been persuasively argued that Indian impulses have strongly influenced the Kabbalah of Judaism, the Orthodox Christian Jesus Prayer, and the recitative and sometimes musical practices of dhikr and sam of Islamic Sufism. It can also easily be argued that the exclusively devotional practices of the Sikh nm simran (discussed by Kristina Myrvold in this volume) are generically more similar to the corresponding European, Middle Eastern, and North African practices than to most Asian forms of meditation. The recitative practices of the Jesus Prayer and the Islamic