attention

    Martial Spirituality and the Ethics of Attention

    While many martial arts include meditation as a part of their practice, some are regarded as being essentially spiritual exercises. Moreover, in a variety of religious traditions, certain forms of prayer and meditation are conceived as preparation for engagement in “spiritual combat.” Most immediately, these practices are designed to enhance one’s capacity to control attention, to defend it from forces that attempt to capture it. I argue in this essay that such a capacity is morally significant. Our behavior is most readily subject to ethical evaluation when it is deliberate behavior, that is, in instances when we are paying careful attention to what we are doing. Moreover, paying attention is itself a kind of doing, something that we can do poorly or well, or fail to do altogether. Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch made this last claim the centerpiece of their philosophy, the foundational insight that grounds an “ethics of attention.” My goal in this essay is to explore the relationship between martial spirituality and an ethics of attention. Toward that end, philosophical pragmatists like William James and Charles Peirce will also prove to be important sources of insight.

    Review of Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies

    This review discusses a helpful edited volume featuring recent scholarship on yoga and meditation studies that address the question: “What exactly is meditation?” In response, the editors “aim to expand the focus of meditation studies to show the diversity of South Asian meditation, including discussions of teachers writing in Telegu, Tamil, Malayalam, and other languages and texts including not only texts about meditation but also songs, poems, letters, and popular devotions. These discussions show the multiplicity of Hindu and South Asian forms of meditation and yoga, engaged in interreligious encounter with Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, and Christianity.”