Meditation and Dogma

The purpose of this research is to examine the phenomenon and practice of meditation as it relates to the experience or dogma of religion. The plan of the research will be to set forth the discursive context in which meditation is relevant to an understanding of religious sensibility and then to discuss ways in which meditation has surfaced in various religious traditions.

In the modern period, not least because of the profound effect of dissemination of information via the mass media, the concept of meditation in popular imagination appears to be most frequently associated with eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Indeed, a body of Western-style analysis has emerged regarding meditation in Buddhist tradition, theory, and practice. For example, distinctions in the character of meditation have been identified in such sectarian strands of Buddhism as Mahayana, including Yogacara, Pure Land, and some Tibetan practice; Theravada;, Vaishaika, Sautrantika, and Zen. What is consistent across all Buddhist teaching is that "[i]t is upon meditative practice that the religious life of the Buddhist virtuoso is based and from such practice that systematic Buddhist philosophical and soteriological theory begins" (Griffiths xiii). More generally, a distinction has been drawn between the religions of the West and those of the East, with the former characterized in significant part by doctrinal discourse of the distinction between God and mank

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t. It implies, however, that for any Buddhist of any school, meditation is of serious moment. In order to develop the awakening mind, we must meditate; it cannot be cultivated merely by wishful thinking and prayers. It cannot be cultivated merely by gaining an intellectual understanding of what it means. Nor can it be cultivated simply by receiving blessings. We have to cultivate it through meditation and repeated prolonged habituation (Dalai Lama 2). Taken together, these ideas about enlightenment suggest that, by and large, it is not a guaranteed experience. At some level, definitively as defined in the Tibetan modality but not solely there confined, it must be sought--i.e., cultivated, habituated, studied, acquired as a consequence of ethical behavior. Meditation in Hindu tradition reaches not so much for ultimate emptiness as for ultimate fulfillment. For Swami Shyam, when the mind attaches to what is ultimate and unchanging and therefore real, what is material can, by way of the mind's power of attachment to the ultimate, achieve reality: "For the real Self that is your Universal Mind, when it is unmanifest is without any substance, and out of this universal Power of the mind every power comes." This transformation of mate

Category: Philosophy - M