Buddhism Archives - Journal of Contemplative Studies

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.”

The Philosophy and Practice of Amulets in Tibetan Buddhist Tantra: Wearing, Analyzing, and Recognizing Your Way to Liberation

Buddhist amulets have been a topic of academic research for decades. But scholarly presuppositions that amulets have circulated primarily in popular Buddhist milieus, related only tangentially to the pursuits of elite practitioners, has limited our appreciation of how amulets have inflected philosophical and contemplative concerns. This article aims to challenge this lopsided perspective by showing how Buddhists in Tibet integrated analytic contemplation into the practice of writing down, wearing, and putting into practice short tantric scriptures that claim to liberate through wearing.

The Art of Imagination at the Intersection of Pramāṇa and Samaya: Normative Epistemology and Tantric Ethics in Early Philosophical Vajrayāna

Buddhist thinkers in Tibet, most especially those associated with Tibet’s Nyingma or Old School of Buddhism, have produced a rich and understudied current of tantric philosophy advancing the authority, validity, and rationality of the tantric view. This paper examines the text, Establishing Appearance as Divine (Snang ba lhar bsgrub pa) by Rongzom (fl. 11th–12th c.). It is our earliest documented instance of a Tibetan “tantric pramāṇa”—that is, an approach characterized by the philosophical integration of exoteric philosophical thought and esoteric ritual and ideology. As such, and in contrast to more narrowly focused studies of Tibetan ritual or Tibetan philosophy, this paper details the form, content, and context of Rongzom’s tantric pramāṇa or epistemological discourse in terms of both classical epistemology and Buddhist Tantra. This study thus sheds light on the relationship envisioned between ritual and philosophy in traditions of Vajrayāna.

No Attainment, Nothing to Attain: A Buddhist Reflection on Psychedelics

The religious or spiritual value of contemplative practices and the use of psychedelics is not intrinsic to experiences obtained through them and is instead relational—a function of how they alter consciousness. Hershock presents a nonreductive, nondualist Buddhist account of consciousness that calls critically into question the merits of both physicalist and phenomenalist reductionism, makes a Buddhist case for seeing that changes in subjective experience are at best provisional goals of these alterations, and draws some challenging inferences regarding the dynamics of contemplative practice, and more.

Portrait of a Poison: Datura in Buddhist Magic

The psychoactive plant Datura metel appears across a range of traditions in premodern South Asia including the form of tantric Buddhism (Vajrayāna) located in the yoginī tantras, where the plant is most prominently used in instructions for bringing about magical acts (ṣaṭkarman). This paper explores the possibility that datura was consumed for its hallucination-inducing potential by considering how the plant was viewed and used in premodern South Asia through an ethnobotanical approach to relevant texts. It argues that the material potency of the plant as a dangerous poison gave it a magical potency that made it a favored ingredient in several hostile magic rites (abhicāra) and suggests that the line between material and magical is an inappropriate distinction to draw when examining these tantras.