Rethinking Meditation by David McMahan
Rethinking Meditation is really two books in one. The first half of the book dismantles the myth that the Buddhist meditation we practice today is the timeless practice handed down from the Buddha. McMahan demonstrates how every culture and historical era reinterprets and repurposes Buddhist practice to make it relevant to its place and time.
Every culture and era has “filters” and “magnets” that de-emphasize some aspects of the Buddhist tradition while amplifying others. Thus, modern Western meditators filter out classical Buddhist themes that are incongruous with late modern Western culture (e.g. rebirth, the foulness of the body) and emphasize themes that are culture-congruent and relevant to the moment (e.g. interdependence, secular re-enchantment, savoring the moment).
As a result the ways in which an Indian Buddhist monk in 200 B.C. understood meditation and the purposes to which he put it, and those of an American “convert” Buddhist in 2023 are remarkably different. For example, the ancient Indian monk contemplated the foulness of the body—how it was filled with phlegm, pus, and bile—and engaged in charnel ground meditations to watch bodies decompose in order to disenchant himself with and disidentify himself from his body.
Modern mindfulness meditators, on the other hand, engage in the body scan to experience the body more fully, to re-inhabit and become more intimate with it, and live a fully embodied life.
References
- Amazon: Rethinking Meditation: Buddhist Meditative Practice in Ancient and Modern Worlds
- Book Review of David McMahan’s Rethinking Meditation
