Join scholar David L. McMahan in a conversation about his new book "Rethinking Meditation".
About the author: David L. McMahan is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practices in Ancient and Modern Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2023), The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2008), Empty Vision: Metaphor and Visionary Imagery in Mahāyāna Buddhism (Routledge Curzon, 2002), and numerous articles on Mahāyāna Buddhism in South Asia and Buddhism in the modern world. He is also the co-editor of Buddhism, Meditation and Science (Oxford University Press, 2017), editor of Buddhism in the Modern World(Routledge 2012). He has written on the early history of Mahāyāna Buddhism in India, as well as the interface of Buddhism and modernity.
About the book:
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."
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.
