The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation write by Eric M. Greene. This book was released on 2021-01-31. The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In the early 400s, numerous Indian and Central Asian Buddhist “meditation masters” (chanshi) traveled to China, where they established the first enduring traditions of Buddhist meditation practice in East Asia. The forms of contemplative practice that these missionaries brought with them, and which their Chinese students further developed, remained for several centuries the basic understanding of “meditation” (chan) in China. Although modern scholars and readers have long been familiar with the approaches to meditation of the Chan (Zen) School that later became so popular throughout East Asia, these earlier and in some ways more pervasive forms of practice have long been overlooked or ignored. This volume presents a comprehensive study of the content and historical formation, as well as complete English translations, of two of the most influential manuals in which these approaches to Buddhist meditation are discussed: the Scripture on the Secret Essential Methods of Chan (Chan Essentials) and the Secret Methods for Curing Chan Sickness (Methods for Curing). Translated here into English for the first time, these documents reveal a distinctly visionary form of Buddhist meditation whose goal is the acquisition of concrete, symbolic visions attesting to the practitioner’s purity and progress toward liberation. Both texts are “apocryphal” scriptures: Taking the form of Indian Buddhist sutras translated into Chinese, they were in fact new compositions, written or at least assembled in China in the first half of the fifth century. Though written in China, their historical significance extends beyond the East Asian context as they are among the earliest written sources anywhere to record certain kinds of information about Buddhist meditation that hitherto had been the preserve of oral tradition and personal initiation. To this extent they indeed divulge, as their titles claim, the “secrets” of Buddhist meditation. Through them, we witness a culture of Buddhist meditation that has remained largely unknown but which for many centuries was widely shared across North India, Central Asia, and China.
Chan Before Chan
Chan Before Chan - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Chan Before Chan write by Eric M. Greene. This book was released on 2021-01-31. Chan Before Chan available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. What is Buddhist meditation? What is going on—and what should be going on—behind the closed or lowered eyelids of the Buddha or Buddhist adept seated in meditation? And in what ways and to what ends have the answers to these questions mattered for Buddhists themselves? Focusing on early medieval China, this book takes up these questions through a cultural history of the earliest traditions of Buddhist meditation (chan), before the rise of the Chan (Zen) School in the eighth century. In sharp contrast to what would become typical in the later Chan School, early Chinese Buddhists approached the ancient Buddhist practice of meditation primarily as a way of gaining access to a world of enigmatic but potentially meaningful visionary experiences. In Chan Before Chan, Eric Greene brings this approach to meditation to life with a focus on how medieval Chinese Buddhists interpreted their own and others’ visionary experiences and the nature of the authority they ascribed to them. Drawing from hagiography, ritual manuals, material culture, and the many hitherto rarely studied meditation manuals translated from Indic sources into Chinese or composed in China in the 400s, Greene argues that during this era meditation and the mastery of meditation came for the first time to occupy a real place in the Chinese Buddhist social world. Heirs to wider traditions that had been shared across India and Central Asia, early medieval Chinese Buddhists conceived of “chan” as something that would produce a special state of visionary sensitivity. The concrete visionary experiences that resulted from meditation were understood as things that could then be interpreted, by a qualified master, as indicative of the mediator’s purity or impurity. Buddhist meditation, though an elite discipline that only a small number of Chinese Buddhists themselves undertook, was thus in practice and in theory constitutively integrated into the cultic worlds of divination and “repentance” (chanhui) that were so important within the medieval Chinese religious world as a whole.
The No-Nonsense Meditation Book
The No-Nonsense Meditation Book - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The No-Nonsense Meditation Book write by Steven Laureys. This book was released on 2021-04-15. The No-Nonsense Meditation Book available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. 'Meditation could retune our brains and help us cope with the long-term effects of the pandemic' - New Scientist 'Readers in search of an introduction to mindfulness that's free of woo-woo promises should look no further.' - Publishers Weekly 'For a boost to your wellbeing don't miss the brilliant The No-Nonsense Meditation Book, which unites brain science with practical tips' – Stylist ---- Rigorously researched and deeply illuminating, world-leading neurologist Dr Steven Laureys works with celebrated meditators to scientifically prove the positive impact meditation has on our brains. Dr Steven Laureys has conducted ground-breaking research into human consciousness for more than 20 years. For this bestselling book, translated into seven languages worldwide, Steven explores the effect of meditation on the brain, using hard science to explain the benefits of a practice that was once thought of as purely spiritual. The result is a highly accessible, scientifically questioning guide to meditation, designed to open the practice to a broader audience. A mix of fascinating science, inspiring anecdote and practical exercises, this accessible book offers thoroughly researched evidence that meditation can have a positive impact on all our lives.
Secret Drugs of Buddhism
Secret Drugs of Buddhism - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Secret Drugs of Buddhism write by Michael Crowley. This book was released on 2019-10-08. Secret Drugs of Buddhism available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Secret Drugs of Buddhism explores the historical evidence for the use of entheogenic plants within the Buddhist tradition and calls attention to the central role which psychedelics played in Indian religions.
The Gentle Way of Buddhist Meditation
The Gentle Way of Buddhist Meditation - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Gentle Way of Buddhist Meditation write by Godwin Samararatne. This book was released on 2007. The Gentle Way of Buddhist Meditation available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
