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The Oxford Handbook of MEDITATION
Edited by MIGUEL FARIAS, DAVID BRAZIER, AND MANSUR LALLJEE
1
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Advisory Board
Jared Lindahl
Willoughby Britton
Gavin Flood Ronald Purser
Acknowledgments
The planning and making of this Oxford Handbook have been a considerable journey. We are especially indebted to those at Oxford University Press who have walked it with us from the beginning: Charlotte Holloway and Martin Baum. The copyediting team was equally extraordinary, and we are very grateful to S. Manikandan and Katherine Ulrich. Thank you also to Elizabeth Morales for designing the Meditation Tree.
We have been heavy-handed editors with our benevolent group of authors. Our Advisory Board substantially assisted us in this task with their detailed comments: Jared Lindahl, Willoughby Britton, Gavin Flood, and Ronald Purser.
None of this would have been possible without the long stream of women and men who have created and passed on the variety and wisdom of meditation practices.
PART I. OVERVIEW
1. Introduction: Understanding and Studying Meditation 3
Miguel Farias, David Brazier, and Mansur Lalljee
2. Meditation and the Modern Encounter between Asia and the West 18
Richard E. King
3. Studying the Effects of Meditation: The First Fifty Years 41 Doug Oman
PART II. MEDITATION ACROSS THE WORLD’S TRADITIONS
4. Hinduism and Meditation: Tantra
Gavin Flood
5. Hinduism and Meditation: Yoga
Bjarne Wernicke- Olesen
6. Judaism and Meditation
Tomer Persico
7. Western Christianity and Meditation
Martin Laird
8. Eastern Christianity and Meditation
Cyril Hovorun
9. Islam and Meditation
Scott Kugle
10. Theravada Buddhism and Meditation
Sarah Shaw
11. Chan Buddhism and Meditation 237
Caifang Zhu
12. Buddhist Meditation in Tibet: Exoteric and Esoteric Orientations 263
Georgios T. Halkias
13. Classical Daoist Meditation, 400–100 bce 288
Harold D. Roth
14. Daoist Meditation: From 100 ce to the Present 310
Louis Komjathy
PART III. VARIETIES OF MEDITATIVE PRACTICES AND EXPERIENCES
15. Relaxation and Meditation 335
Ayesha Nathoo
16. Concentration and Visualization Techniques in Buddhist Meditation 361
Nobuyoshi Yamabe
17. The Phenomenology of Meditation: Commonalities and Divergences between Christian Meditatio and Hindu Dhyāna 384
Carlos Henrique do Carmo Silva
18. The Self in Meditation: The Art of Self-Transformation 401 Jessica Frazier
PART IV. APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF MEDITATION
Biology and Neuroscience
19. Meditation and the Brain in Health and Disease 429
Kieran C. R. Fox and B. Rael Cahn
20. Psychophysiology of Meditation 462
Dusana Dorjee
Psychology
21. Meditation and Emotion 481
Tim Lomas
22. Individual Differences in Meditation Outcomes
Ivana Buric, Inti Brazil, and Valerie van Mulukom
23. Reflections on the Role of Control in Meditation
Deane H. Shapiro, Jr.
24. Psychological Theories of Meditation in Early Buddhism and Sāmkhya/Yoga
Peter Sedlmeier and Kunchapudi Srinivas Sociology
25. The Sociology of Meditation
Michal Pagis
26. The Demographics of Meditation in the United Sates
Conrad Hackett
27. Meditation and the Post-Secular Condition
Manu Bazzano
28. Christian Contemplative Thought and Practice in the Contemporary World
Douglas E. Christie
29. Goenka’s Vipassana Movement: From Conversion to Disaffiliation
Masoumeh Rahmani
30. Meditation in Contemporary Monastic Life
Caroline Starkey
Therapeutic Applications 31. Mental Illness through the Lens of Mindfulness
Patricia Lynn Dobkin and Kaveh Monshat
32. Mindfulness-Based Interventions in the Treatment of Physical Conditions
Madhav Goyal and Heather L. Rusch
33. Transcendental Meditation in the Treatment of Mental and Physical Conditions 717
David W. Orme-Johnson
34. Zen Therapy 747
David Brazier
Social Change
35. Enacting Social Change Through Buddhist Meditation 771
Ann Gleig
36. Meditation and Education 792
Candy Gunther Brown
37. Meditation in Prison 818
Katherine M. Auty
PART VI. DEBATES AND CONTROVERSIES IN MEDITATION
38. Challenging and Adverse Meditation Experiences: Toward a Person-Centered Approach 841
Jared R. Lindahl, Willoughby B. Britton, David J. Cooper, and Laurence J. Kirmayer
39. The Dark Nights of the Soul in Abrahamic Meditative Traditions 865
Nathan Fisher
40. Meditation Sickness 887
Juhn Y. Ahn
41. Meditation to Kill and Be Killed By: The Use of Samādhi Power in Imperial Japan 907
Brian Victoria
42. Neuroscience and Meditation: Help or Hindrance? 925
Ronald E. Purser and David J. Lewis
43. Meditation, Exceptional Psychophysiological Control, and Parapsychology 945
Etzel Cardeña Index 969
List of Contributors
Juhn Y. Ahn is Associate Professor of Buddhist and Korean Studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Buddhas and Ancestors: Religion and Wealth in FourteenthCentury Korea (University of Washington Press, 2018). Ahn's research focuses on the history of Chan/Zen Buddhism and also the history of wealth, weather, and the monastic economy in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Korea.
Katherine M. Auty is a Senior Research Associate in the Prisons Research Centre, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. Katherine received her PhD in forensic psychiatry from Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry in 2013. Her research interests include prison yoga and meditation programs, and their relationship to prisoner well-being.
Manu Bazzano is a psychotherapist, psychotherapy supervisor, and internationally recognized lecturer and author. He tutors philosophy, psychotherapy, and creative writing at the University of Cambridge. His latest books are Nietzsche and Psychotherapy (Routledge, 2019) and Re-Visioning Existential Therapy: Counter-traditional Perspectives (Routledge, 2020). In 2004 he was ordained in the Soto and Rinzai tradition of Zen Buddhism.
David Brazier is President of the International Zen Therapy Institute and author of a dozen books and many chapters, monographs, and articles on Buddhism, psychology, and culture. He lectures on Buddhism and Buddhist psychology in Europe, Asia, and North & South America and supervises educational programs in English and Spanish. He has practiced meditation for over fifty years.
Inti A. Brazil is an Associate Professor at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. His research is primarily focused on the cognitive and neural mechanisms driving behavioral change in offender populations. He has been involved in research related to the usefulness of interventions, such as yoga and meditation, in facilitating change of behavior in both general and incarcerated populations.
Willoughby B. Britton is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and the Co-director of the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at Brown University Medical School. Her research investigates the neurophysiological and psychological effects of contemplative practices in both clinical and non-clinical samples and settings, with a focus on moderators of outcome, practice-specific effects, and adverse effects.
Candy Gunther Brown is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University and the author or editor of six books, most recently Debating Yoga and Mindfulness in Public Schools: Reforming Secular Education or Reestablishing Religion? (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Dr. Brown has served as an expert witness in four legal challenges to school meditation and yoga—testifying for both parents and school districts.
Ivana Buric is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on examining mind-body interventions with approaches from different disciplines, including psychology, molecular biology, and cognitive neuroscience.
B. Rael Cahn is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the USC Center for Mindfulness Science at the University of Southern California. Dr. Cahn is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist focusing on researching the neurophysiologic bases and clinical impact of meditative practices, psychedelic psychotherapy, and other integrative psychiatric approaches.
Etzel Cardeña holds the endowed Thosen Chair at the Department of Psychology, Lund University, Sweden, where he directs CERCAP, Center for Research on Consciousness and Anomalous Psychology. He has more than 350 publications and is the senior editor of Varieties of Anomalous Experience, the two volumes of Altered Consciousness: Mutidisciplinary Perspectives, and Parapsychology: A Handbook for the 21st Century, among other books.
Douglas E. Christie is Professor of the Theological Studies Department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Word in The Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford), The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Note for a Contemplative Ecology (Oxford) and is the founding editor of Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality (Johns Hopkins). He has been awarded fellowships from the Luce Foundation, the Lilly Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. From 2013–2015 he served as Codirector of the Casa de la Mateada study abroad program in Córdoba, Argentina, a faith-based program rooted in the Jesuit vision of education for solidarity. He lives in Los Angeles.
David J. Cooper, a researcher in the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University, has worked on the Varieties of Contemplative Experience Project since 2014. Cooper received an M.A. in Religious Studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he focused on Buddhist traditions. His research interests include narrative and social dimensions of religious experience, particularly those relating to the sense of self and to the body.
Patricia Lynn Dobkin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She is a clinical psychologist specialized in mind-body medicine and is a certified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher. Her two books on mindful medical practice showcase how the MBSR program has been adapted for health care professionals.
Dusana Dorjee is Associate Professor of Psychology in Education at the University of York in the UK. Dr. Dorjee is a cognitive neuroscientist and psychologist investigating the core neurocognitive and psychophysiological mechanisms of meditation from a developmental perspective, mostly in the context of education.
Miguel Farias is the founding director of the Brain, Belief, and Behaviour Lab and an Associate Professor and at the Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations, in Coventry University. Previously he was a lecturer in Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. His book with C. Wikholm, The Buddha Pill: Can Meditation Change You? (2015), has been translated into various languages.
Nathan Fisher is a PhD student in Religious Studies and Cognitive Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was formerly the research coordinator of the Varieties of Contemplative Experience Project at the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at Brown University, and his current research interests include Abrahamic contemplative traditions and dynamical approaches to cognitive and clinical science.
Gavin Flood FBA is Professor of Hindu Studies and Comparative Religion at Oxford University. He has worked on Hindu Tantric traditions and has research interests in comparative religion and hermeneutical phenomenology. Among his books are Religion and the Philosophy of Life (2019) and The Truth Within: A History of Inwardness in Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism (2013).
Kieran C. R. Fox is a neuroscientist in the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University. Dr. Fox's research focuses on the neural basis of higher human capacities, including meditation, mind-wandering, creativity, and consciousness. He is currently an MD candidate at Stanford's School of Medicine.
Jessica Frazier is a University Research Lecturer in Theology and Religion at Oxford University and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Her work explores key philosophical themes across cultures, from Indian concepts of “Being” to 20th-century Phenomenology. She is the founding editor of the Journal of Hindu Studies and an occasional contributor to BBC programs. Her books include Hindu Worldviews: Theories of Self, Ritual and Reality (Bloomsbury, 2017), and Categorisation in Indian Philosophy (Ashgate, 2014).
Ann Gleig is an Associate Professor of Religion and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Florida. She is author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity (Yale University Press, 2019) and co-author with Lola Williamson of Homegrown Gurus: From Hinduism in America to American Hinduism (SUNY Press, 2013).
Madhav Goyal is an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He is an internal medicine physician whose research focuses on the effects of meditation on health, pain, and chronic symptoms.
Conrad Hackett is Associate Director of Research and Senior Demographer at Pew Research Center. At Maryland Population Research Center, he is a visiting research
professor. He studies global religious change and the demographic characteristics of religious groups.
Georgios T. Halkias is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on Tibetan Pure Land Buddhism, Indo-Tibetan Vajrayāna traditions, Himalayan Studies, and Buddhism and Hellenism in India and Central Asia. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Buddhism.
Cyril Hovorun is Professor of Ecclesiology, International Relations, and Ecumenism at the Stockholm School of Theology/Sankt Ignatios College in Sweden. He has published books and articles covering the fields of patristics, ecclesiology, ecumenism, and public theology.
Richard King is Emeritus Professor of Buddhist and Asian Studies at the University of Kent. He has published numerous books and articles on Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, postcolonial theory and the study of India, theories of religion, and spirituality and capitalism. His books include: Early Advaita Vedānta and Buddhism (1995), Orientalism and Religion (1999); Selling Spirituality (2005), and Religion/Theory/ Critique (2017, Ed.).
Laurence J. Kirmayer is James McGill Professor and Director of the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University, Canada. He is editor-in-chief of the journal Transcultural Psychiatry and directs the Culture and Mental Health Research Unit at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, where he studies cultural contexts of illness and healing. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada.
Louis Komjathy 康思奇 is an independent scholar-educator and translator. He researches and has published extensively in contemplative studies, Daoist studies, and religious studies, with specific interests in contemplative practice, embodiment, and mystical experience. He is founding co-chair of the Daoist Studies Unit (2004–2010) and the Contemplative Studies Unit (2010–2016) in the American Academy of Religion. In addition to over thirty academic articles and book chapters, he has published nine books to date, including Taming the Wild Horse: An Annotated Translation and Study of the Daoist Horse Taming Pictures and Introducing Contemplative Studies. He lives on the Northshore of Chicago, Illinois.
Scott Kugle serves as Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies at Emory University in Atlanta, USA. His fields of expertise include Sufism, Islamic society in South Asia, and issues of gender and sexuality. He is the author of seven books, including Sufis and Saints’ Bodies: Corporeality and Sacred Power in Islam and Sufi Meditation and Contemplation: Timeless Wisdom from Mughal India. He conducts research in India and Pakistan, on Sufi ethics and sacred music, while his research languages are Arabic, Urdu, and Persian.
Martin Laird, OSA, is Professor of Early Christian Studies at Villanova University, USA. Laird has written a host of books and articles on early Christian thought and
Christian contemplative life, including Into the Silent Land; A Sunlit Absence; and An Ocean of Light. He lectures widely throughout the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland.
Mansur Lalljee is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford. He has published work on a wide range of psychological issues including the psychology of respect; the psychology of explanation; religion; social and political attitudes; and interpersonal communication. He has been an editor of the European Journal of Social Psychology and the Chair of the Social Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society.
David Lewis is an independent researcher of Western and Eastern philosophical and psychological traditions at The Center for Trauma and Contemplative Practice, and a long-time Buddhist practitioner under the tutelage of the late Gelek Rimpoche and others. He is a retired computer scientist, mathematician, and software professional, and served in that capacity on the faculty at Brown University, Cornell University, and Ithaca College.
Jared R. Lindahl is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Brown University. At Brown, he is also affiliated with Contemplative Studies and is co-director of the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Lab. His work on the Varieties of Contemplative Experience Research Project is emblematic of his broader interest in bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to bear on the range of contemplative practices and resultant experiences.
Tim Lomas is a Senior Lecturer in positive psychology at the University of East London. Since 2013, Tim has published numerous papers and books relating to well-being, involving topics that include linguistics, mindfulness, Buddhism, gender, art, and cross-cultural enquiry. His current main area of research involves creating a lexicography of untranslatable words relating to well-being (www.drtimlomas.com/lexicography).
Kaveh Monshat is a consultant psychiatrist, psychotherapist, researcher, and a mindfulness and non-violent communication teacher. He completed his doctorate and held an academic post at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Ayesha Nathoo is a Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter where she recently completed a Wellcome Research Fellowship for the project “Cultivating Relaxation in Twentieth-Century Britain.” She is a cultural historian of modern medicine, and her current research focuses on holistic healthcare, healing, and the development of mind-body medicine. She has previously held Research Fellowships at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and at the Science Museum, London.
Doug Oman is a Professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health, having taught there since 2001. His research investigates spirituality/religion and health and includes two randomized trials of spiritual meditation. He directs a training program on spirituality and public health and edited Why Religion and Spirituality Matter for Public Health: Evidence, Implications, and Resources (Springer, 2018).
David W. Orme-Johnson is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Maharishi International University, where he was a founding faculty member in 1972, serving as chair of the psychology department and director of its doctoral program. Orme-Johnson has over 100 publications on the effects of the Transcendental Meditation and other meditation techniques, having pioneered in meditation’s effects on stress reduction, prison rehabilitation, health, neurophysiological effects, and cognitive abilities.
Michal Pagis is Associate Professor of Sociology at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She is the author of Inward: Vipassana Meditation and the Embodiment of the Self (Chicago, 2019). She studies transformations of self and identity in contemporary culture and has published on meditation, life-coaching, spirituality, and the intersection of religion and popular psychology.
Tomer Persico is the Scholar in Residence for the Shalom Hartman Institute in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at UC Berkeley. His fields of study are contemporary spirituality, Jewish renewal, Jewish religious extremism, and forms of secularization and religiosity.
Ronald E. Purser is Professor of Management at San Francisco State University. His recent writings critically examine Buddhism’s encounter with modernity and capitalism, particularly in corporate settings. He is the author of eight books, including McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. His study of Buddhism began forty years ago at the Tibetan Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California.
Masoumeh Rahmani is a Lecturer in Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She previously held a Research Associate position in the Brain, Belief and Behaviour lab at Coventry University. Rahmani received her PhD from University of Otago in 2017. Her research interests include religious change, meditation movements, and Asian religions in non-Asian contexts.
Harold D. Roth is Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies and the Director of the Contemplative Studies program at Brown University. Roth is a scholar of classical Chinese philosophy and religion where he has focused on the contemplative foundations of classical Daoism. He is also a pioneer in the new field of Contemplative Studies.
Heather L Rusch is a Research Fellow in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Karolinska Institute collaborative doctoral program in Clinical Neuroscience. She earned her MS in Neuroscience at Columbia University and completed her clinical training at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Ms. Rusch specializes in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Her research aims to inform new insights into pathogenic markers and targeted therapeutics for individuals challenged with PTSD.
Peter Sedlmeier is Professor of Psychology at the Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany. He has held positions at the Universities of Konstanz, Salzburg, Chicago, and
Paderborn before, and has spent several sabbaticals at Pondicherry University, India. His current areas of interest include the psychology of meditation, music psychology, time processing, and computer modeling of cognitive and statistical processes.
Deane H. Shapiro, Jr. has served as a Professor of Psychology, emeritus, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine, Dean of Academic Affairs at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, and on the Clinical Faculty, Stanford School of Medicine. He has devoted his professional career to seeking to understand how individuals can gain, maintain, and regain a positive sense of control in their lives—mentally, emotionally, interpersonally, and in their views of the nature of the universe. His research involved developing a theory of human control, a psychological test to measure a person’s control profile (the SCI), and a specific therapeutic approach (Control Therapy) to match the most effective strategies to a person’s particular control profile. His interest in control took him to Zen and Chan monasteries in Japan and Taiwan to explore meditation; the jungles of Bali to study stress management and trance dances; and the mystical hills of Safed, Israel, where the main obstacle to a good night’s sleep is purported to be the fluttering sound of angels’ wings.
Sarah Shaw is the Khyentse Foundation Reader in Buddhist Studies, University of South Wales, UK. She is a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies and a member of the faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. She has written a number of books on meditation, mindfulness, and early Buddhist text, chant, and narrative. She is a longstanding practitioner and teacher with the Samatha Trust, UK.
Carlos Henrique do Carmo Silva is an independent scholar and Emeritus Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Lisbon. He has also held lecturing appointments at the University of Lisbon and the University of Évora. He has authored over one hundred articles and chapters on various topics, including ancient philosophy, Christian mysticism, Eastern philosophy, and consciousness studies.
Kunchapudi Srinivas† was Professor of Philosophy at Pondicherry University, India. He held a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University and was an expert in both Eastern and Western philosophy. His areas of research included epistemology, Indian and Western, philosophy of science, symbolic logic, and the philosophical foundations of meditation.
Caroline Starkey is Associate Professor of Religion and Society at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on religion in contemporary Britain, particularly in relation to minority religions and gender. Her monograph, Women in British Buddhism: Connection, Commitment, Community, was published by Routledge in 2020.
Valerie van Mulukom is an Associate Professor at Coventry University. She is a cognitive scientist whose research focuses on imagination, memory, and belief, using methodologies from experimental and social psychology, and embodied and cognitive neuroscience. She is an editor of the Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion.
Brian Victoria is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies and a fully ordained priest in the Sōtō Zen sect of Buddhism. He is the author of a trilogy on the role Zen Buddhism played within Japanese totalitarianism including Zen at War, Zen War Stories, and Zen Terror in Prewar Japan: Portrait of an Assassin.
Bjarne Wernicke-Olesen is a Research Lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and a tutor in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sanskrit at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. He is the director of the Śākta Traditions Research Programme at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, and his research focuses on goddess traditions, yoga, and asceticism in South Asia.
Nobuyoshi Yamabe is Professor of Asian Philosophy at Waseda University. His academic interests include Yogācāra Buddhism (in particular, the theory of ālayavijñāna in the context of mind-body correlation) and Buddhist meditation and visualization in Central Asia.
Caifang Zhu is the Founding Director of Beijing Counseling and Meditation Center. He is an Associate Director and Research Fellow at Hebei Research Institute of Chan Buddhism in China. He is also the Deputy Secretary and board member of the International Transpersonal Association. While studying at Harvard Divinity School he was a teaching fellow with the East Asian Studies Program (2002–2004) and chaired the Harvard Buddhist Community (2003–2004).
part I
OVERVIEW
Introduction
Understanding and Studying Meditation
Miguel Farias, David Brazier, & Mansur Lalljee
Meditation Today
The Oxford Handbook of Meditation responds to the interest in contemplative methods that has grown in recent decades and has spread beyond the religious and spiritual disciplines into medicine, psychology, and popular culture. Originally developed by and for religious women and men who lived within monastic contexts or at the margins of society, some of these practices underwent significant adaptations to allow practically anyone, from any background, to use them. From being regarded as odd and marginal, what used to be derided as navel gazing or New Age fad has become a prescription for survival in an increasingly stressful and complex modern environment.
This increased popular interest has underlined the importance of questions about the origins, aims, and effects of meditation. How much is known about its varieties? What were they developed for and by whom? How similar or different are they? How effective can they be in changing our minds and bodies? What are their social and ethical implications? To answer these and other questions, we have put together this Handbook with contributions from leading experts.
Our aim is to pitch this volume at a level that is rigorous academically while still easily understandable to all interested in exploring or learning more about meditation, whether the interest be personal, professional, or spiritual. To this end we have encouraged contributors to use less jargon and technical language than they might otherwise have been inclined. It is, however, inevitable that a book of this kind includes a range of technical terms and, where this is so, we have tried to see that as far as possible they are described in a way accessible to the general reader. This is such a broad field that even
