Abstract
In its history, the scholarly study of meditation has been the preserve of orientalists, historians and phenomenologists of religion and, more recently, psychologists of consciousness. These investigators have, on the whole, been mindful of philological, textual and descriptive matters. Little attention has been given to philosophical, theoretical, or sociological aspects of meditation. In particular, the many possible connections between characteristics of meditational practice and institutionalized theories of knowledge, brought to light in other areas by the sociology of knowledge, have been ignored.
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Notes
Dan Goleman, ‘Perspectives on Psychology, Reality, and the Study of Consciousness’, Journal of Transpersonal Psychology 4 (1974): 4.
Winston King, ‘A Comparison of Theravāda and Zen Meditation’, History of Religions 9 (1969): 310.
K. N. Jayatilleke, Early Buddhist Theory of Knowledge (London George Allen and Unwin, 1963). See also David Kalupahana, ‘A Buddhist Tract on Empiricism’, Philosophy East and West 19 (1969); idem, Causality: The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1975); idem, Buddhist Philosophy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1976).
V. Trenckner, A Critical Pali Dictionary, 1 (Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 1924–1948), 201–2.
T. W. Rhys-Davids and W. Stede (eds), Pali Text Society’s Pali English Dictionary (London: Luzac, 1966), 39.
Ibid., 39, 101; Nyanatiloka, Buddhist Dictionary (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Frewin, 1972), 17.
Winston King, ‘The Structure and Function of the Trance of Cessation in Theravāda Meditation’, manuscript read at Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Chicago, November, 1975.
Ernest Gellner, Legitimation of Belief (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
A. K. Warder, ‘Early Buddhism and Other Contemporary Systems’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 17 (1956): 43–63.
Padmasiri De Silva, Buddhist and Freudian Psychology (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Lake House, 1974).
Rune Johanssen, The Psychology of Nirvāna (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969).
Paul Demieville, Le Concile du Lhasa (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1952);
also, Erich Obermiller, ‘A Sanskrit Ms. from Tibet — Kamalaśīla’s Bhavanakrama’, Journal of the Greater India Society 2 (1935): 1–11; Giuseppe Tucci, trans., Minor Buddhist Texts, Part II. The First Bhavana-Krama of Kamalaśīla, Série Orientale 9 (2) (Rome: Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1958).
Phillip Yampolsky, trans., The Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).
Heinrich Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, P. Peachev, trans. (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 87.
Gunapala Dharmasiri, A Buddhist Critique of the Christian Concept of God (Colombo, Sri Lanka: Lake House, 1975), 199ff.
Erich Obermiller, ‘A Sanskrit Ms. from Tibet — Kamalaśīla’s Bhavanakrama’, Journal of the Greater India Society 2 (1935): 5.
A. K. Warder, Indian Buddhism (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1970), 467f.
Giuseppe Tucci, trans., Minor Buddhist Texts, Part II. The First Bhavana-Krama of Kamalaśīla, Serie Orientale 9 (2) (Rome: Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente, 1958), 173–175.
Karl Potter, Presuppositions of India’s Philosophies (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 239f.
A. K. Warder, Indian Buddhism (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1970), 476f.
F. Theodore Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic, 2 vols [1930] (New York: Dover, 1962), 1: 76f.
Richard Gombrich, Precept and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 121f.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Doubleday, 1967), Chs 1–4, 11, 15, 16.
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© 1993 Ivan Strenski
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Strenski, I. (1993). Gradual Enlightenment, Sudden Enlightenment and Empiricism. In: Religion in Relation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11866-3_6
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