Review of Meditation, Buddhism, and Science by David L. McMahan and Erik Braun

Transcription

1 Journal of Dharma Studies (2018) 1: BOOK REVIEW Review of Meditation, Buddhism, and Science by David L. McMahan and Erik Braun David L. McMahan, Erik Braun, eds. Meditation, Buddhism, and Science. New York: Oxford University Press, pages. ISBN: (paperback), $ ISBN (Hardcover), $ Thomas Calobrisi 1 Published online: 15 August 2018 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018 Meditation, Buddhism, and Science, edited by David L. McMahan (Franklin & Marshall College) and Erik Braun (University of Virginia), provides a series of essays from scholars in the humanistic disciplines religious studies and philosophy in particular on the issues surrounding the recent surge of scientific studies of Buddhist and Buddhist-derived meditation techniques. The introduction by McMahan and Braun works to give a framework to the chapters in the volume by providing a genealogy of the scientific study of meditation as it has come to be in the present, particularly in the United States, and considering its cultural and institutional place as well as the scrutiny that such studies and the promoters of meditation as a panacea for the ills of contemporary life have received. The editors note that the goal of this volume is not to police the boundaries of Buddhist meditation by adjudicating these disputes ; rather, they state the chapters of their book show that never before has meditation been put to so many varied purposes within so many different worldviews (14 15). This genealogy is followed by an overview of the chapters and the intentions behind the curation of the volume. Consciously drawing contributions from a number of intellectual and disciplinary perspectives within the humanities, the editors state that we hope that this volume exemplifies some of the ways that humanistic thought is essential to the study of meditation since, in our view, meditation in the laboratory can never fully account for how such practices function in the lives of practitioners in these complex social, cultural, and historical contexts (15). Moreover, the editors claim that their intention is not to flatly oppose the scientific study of meditation, but to place such studies their practices and assumptions into a broader social and historical context. Including the * Thomas Calobrisi tcalobrisi@ses.gtu.edu 1 Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA 94709, USA

2 190 Journal of Dharma Studies (2018) 1: introduction, the volume contains ten chapters: contributions to the volume are from David L. McMahan, Evan Thompson, William Edelglass, William Waldron, Joanna Cook, Julia Cassaniti, Jeff Wilson, Erik Braun, and Robert H. Sharf. The first four chapters of the book lay out a specific problem and possible correctives to it. McMahan s chapter How Meditation Works, begins from the premise that meditation works or has a kind of function in terms of what internal experiences it produces and for whom. Rather than construing meditation as an entirely internal affair McMahan seeks to demonstrate how meditation gains its function that is, its content as an internal experience and the meaning of that content from its external contexts. By examining the exegesis of Pāli scriptures in both ancient and modern contexts, McMahan shows how meditation functions as what the philosopher Michel Foucault would call a technology of the self which, both implicitly and explicitly, relies on its content and the meaning of it from a variety of discourses, institutions, and identities. The matter of the implicit and explicit foundations of the function and meaning of meditation that is, the matter of context is the problem address by the following three chapters. Thompson s chapter, Looping Effects and the Cognitive Science of Mindfulness Meditation, considers how the neuroscientific image of the human mind colors the conclusions of cognitive scientific studies of meditation, what he calls a looping effect. This image, he contends, leads to the equation of the neurological conditions for mindfulness with mindfulness itself, and in doing so fails consider how this narrow focus on these conditions elide the broader contexts of mindfulness, both bodily and ethical. Thompson provides an enactive approach to imagining cognition, which views it as sense-making through embodied action (58), as a corrective to this narrow conception and the looping effects which it produces. To put this another way, Thompson seeks to imagine mindfulness as an embodied process which involves mental and physical discipline in the service of an ethical, which is to say social end. More than a philosophical corrective, Thompson provides a methodological corrective, namely, cognitive scientific studies of meditation should include cognitive ethnographers and a lab life ethnographer and should conduct a reflexive analysis on how experimental investigation as a cultural practice contributes to constituting the phenomenon being studied (60 61). William Edelglass s chapter Buddhism, Happiness, and the Science of Meditation, not unlike Thompson s chapter, considers the presumptions which are brought to bare in scientific studies of meditation. Rather than focusing on the neuroscientific image of the mind, Edelglass concerns himself with the uncritical use of the metric of happiness in such studies. Edelglass notes that the scientific study of meditation be it sociological or neurological has undergone a happiness turn which, as the name implies, has drawn attention to measuring the happiness produced by meditation. Edelglass performs a comparative analysis between the modern assumptions about happiness which undergird the metric used in scientific studies with the conception of happiness developed by the Indian Buddhist philosopher and poet Śāntideva (c. 685 c. 783 CE). By comparing these two, Edelglass shows that more traditional Buddhist conceptions of happiness can be at odds with modern ones, which in the case of Śāntideva manifests in the attitude taken towards the desire to experience life satisfaction or positive feelings and the impediments these can create towards greater wisdom and compassion. The comparative analysis allows also for a kind

3 Journal of Dharma Studies (2018) 1: transvaluation of values, prompting the reader to consider how happiness has become categorized and quantified, employed in medical regimes of discourse, and may, as per Śāntideva s warning, lead to greater suffering if blindly pursued. William Waldron s chapter, Reflections on Indian Buddhist Thought and the Study of Meditation continues in the same trajectory as those of Thompson and Edelglass, this time considering the issues raised by distinction between first-and third-person studies of meditation. Waldron claims that the dichotomy between first-and thirdperson studies, and the Cartesian dualism which provides the foundation for it, creates a fork in the road leading to two equally undesirable outcomes: incommensurability or reductionism. Foregoing both options, Waldron employs the two major branches of Mahāyāna Buddhist thought Madhyamaka and Yogācāra to deconstruct Cartesian dualism on ontological and epistemological grounds. The upshot of his deconstruction is an affirmation of the provisional and conventional, a denial of the purity which ontological and epistemological dualisms demand, and, interestingly, an exhortation to consider both the scientists and the monks in studies of meditation as using interpretive frameworks to describe and analyze meditative experiences. Joanna Cook s chapter Mind the Gap : Appearance and Reality in Mindfulness- Based Cognitive Therapy is a departure from the concern of the previous chapters for the contextual nature of scientific studies of meditation. Cook focuses on a particular and rather popular Buddhist-derived meditation technique, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and studies it ethnographically. Cook seeks to demonstrate how this technique is conceived of as analogous, both structurally and in practice, to scientific protocols in so far as it seeks to aid the practitioner distinguish between appearance and reality. She shows this through comparing the perspectives and practices prescribed by MBCT to the concept and practice of phenomenological modification in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. She also considers the notion of purification in the work of the sociologist of science Bruno Latour to further show the distinction between appearance and reality should be taken as an effect to be explained rather than an explanation in and of itself (130), that is, appearance and reality are created in the act of making such distinctions rather than being there to be discovered by the practitioner. Julia Cassaniti s chapter Wherever You Go, There You Aren t? : Non-Self, Spirits, and the Concept of the Person in Thai Buddhist Mindfulness, like the previous one by Cook, takes as its springboard the practice of mindfulness meditation and studies it ethnographically. Cassaniti shows how North American and Thai Buddhist practitioners of mindfulness meditation have rather different understandings of the practice and what it reveals about the self that is, if there is one or not, and what constitutes it. Through her engagement with Thai Buddhist practitioners of mindfulness, Cassaniti finds that concepts of self and personhood as in the case of the Thai Buddhist notion of khwan, or spirits or wits related to the ideal mindful practitioner are constructed differently over space and between cultures. While promoters of mindfulness meditation in North American, such as Jon Kabat-Zinn, seek to neutralize the Buddhist and regional cultural influences on meditation practices, Cassaniti claims that they cannot escape tacitly including their own values in what appears as a decontextualized and neutral practice. She urges her reader to take seriously the anthropological study of notions of personhood and the relationship of such notions

4 192 Journal of Dharma Studies (2018) 1: to idealized practitioners of mindfulness. In this sense, Cassaniti s conclusions are not dissimilar from those by McMahan, Thompson, Edelglass, and Waldron. Jeff Wilson s chapter, Mindfulness Makes You a Way Better Lover : Mindful Sex and the Adaptation of Buddhism to New Cultural Desires, departs from the philosophical issue of the contexts of knowledge and explores the ways in which mindfulness meditation has been utilized as a means to improve one s love life. Wilson considers the following question: What are we to make of non-scientists and non-buddhists reference both to science and Buddhism to promote women s health and happiness via the practice of mindful sex? (153) Examining three salient aspects of the mindful sex phenomenon namely clinical studies of mindfulness and sex; self-help applications of mindfulness and sex; and mindful sex as a mode of self enchantment (156) Wilson shows how mindfulness meditation is framed in markedly different ways for different purposes. He also notes the gendered character of interest in mindful sex it is mostly directed at women but not to the total exclusion of men and that the application of mindfulness to sex issues constitutes a kind of mission creep in which the efficacy of mindfulness in one arena of life is license to apply it in another. Wilson concludes with the insight that the static designation in any strict manner of the mindfulness movement as religious or secular or scientific or spiritual is ultimately useless for researchers (171), that researchers need to pay careful attention to the intricate webs of uses and meanings (172) present in the mindfulness movement. Erik Braun s chapter, Mindful but Not Religious: Meditation and Enchantment in the Work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, as the title suggests, explores the work of Jon Kabat- Zinn, the biologist and meditation teacher who pioneered the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. Braun seeks to demonstrate how Kabat-Zinn s understanding of mindfulness draws on influences from non-buddhist sources such as American Transcendentalism and Romanticism as well as from modern science and psychotherapy. Braun looks to the languaging Kabat-Zinn s understandings of science, philosophy, and the dharma, for example to construe mindfulness as means to enchant modern life. In doing so, Braun shows how Kabat-Zinn s vision of mindfulness and its meaning complicates standard notions of the sacred and the secular and contributes to what he calls the Buddhification of American culture that is, the way in which mentalities, ideas, and beliefs derived from Buddhism have come to have transformative purchase on [American] spiritual visions more broadly (196). Braun sees Kabat-Zinn as a distinctive agent of change whose vision of mindfulness has had profound effects on American spirituality (196). Robert H. Sharf s chapter, Is Mindfulness Buddhist? (and Why It Matters), like the chapter by Edelglass, puts the contemporary mindfulness movement into comparison with traditional Buddhist thought. Sharf draws on the Chinese Chan and Tibetan Dzogchen movements as parallels to the mindfulness movement in so far as they are all focused on the cultivation of present-centered awareness, promised quick results, and were created as efforts to reform the tradition and make it more accessible to the laity. He then considers the criticisms these movements faced in China and Tibet most striking for this reader was the record of the debate between the Indian Buddhist philosopher Kamalaśīla and the Chinese Chan master Heshang Moheyan, wherein the former claims basically that there is a special place in hell for yogis who suppose falsely that the aim of meditation is to cease thinking altogether (209). Sharf draws on the example of the Critical Buddhism developed by the Japanese Buddhist scholars

5 Journal of Dharma Studies (2018) 1: Hakamaya Noriaki and Matsumoto Shirō to show that the perennialist attitude in Buddhism shows up in various cultural settings and how to criticize such attitudes from Buddhist and non-buddhist perspectives. In their introduction to the volume, Braun and McMahan note that in recent years there has been a mindfulness backlash in various parts of the media and academia. This backlash as it were has called out the ways in mindfulness meditation has been problematically recommended as a cure-all, its misuses in corporate settings and the military, and the deracination of the practice from its traditional understandings and aims (13 15). While these criticisms are pertinent and entirely valid in my view, they tend to ignore the philosophical issues that surround both the production of scientific knowledge about meditation and the promotion of meditation in a culture to which it has been foreign. In this regard, the chapters of this volume are a welcome contribution to the current discussion of the phenomenon of mass meditation. While each contribution is certainly unique in its own right, they work together nicely to address, in a rigorous and nuanced manner, the broader themes of context (McMahan, Thompson, Edelglass, Waldron, and Cassaniti) and transformation (Cook, Wilson, Braun, and Sharf). Although the editors provide some remarks on the overarching themes of the chapters in their introduction, a full conclusion from the editors on the impacts of the research presented in the chapters and further avenues of exploration would have been a nice touch. This book is highly recommended, particularly to those interested in the ever-changing relationship between Buddhism and science.