Abstract
How do abstract philosophies turn into lived reality? Based on 2 years of ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews of vipassana meditation practitioners in Israel and the United States, the paper follows the process through which meditators embody the three main Buddhist tenets: dissatisfaction, impermanence and not-self. While meditators consider these tenets central to Buddhist philosophy, it is only through the practice of meditation that the tenets are experienced on the bodily level and thereby are “realized” as truth. This realization takes place in the situated environment of the meditation center, where participation in long meditation retreats facilitates the production of specific subjective experiences that infuse the knowledge of Buddhist tenets with embodied meaning. The paper illustrates how abstract concepts and embodied experience support one another in the construction of meditators’ phenomenological reality and suggests a general framework for studying the variety of relations that exist between the conceptual and embodied dimensions of different types of knowledge.
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Notes
Interviews in Israel were conducted in Hebrew. Excerpts from these conversations were translated by the author.
Buddhist thought includes many different schools and interpretations. When I use the term “Buddhist philosophy” in this paper, I refer to the teachings of the Buddha, known as Dhamma, as they appear in the seminal texts of Theravada Buddhism. These texts were written in Pali, the scriptural language of Theravada Buddhism.
Until recently, such a study was not possible, since meditation practice was mainly a monastic practice not shared with outsiders. The recent popularity of meditation practice among lay people enables us to approach this question empirically, through following ethnographically the gradual process by which Buddhist wisdom is cultivated. See also Cook 2006.
The names of all interview subjects, as well as some details of their personal lives, have been changed to provide anonymity.
As I have written elsewhere (Pagis 2009), vipassana meditation is based on embodied self-reflexivity, one that avoids entering the realm of symbolic interpretation (i.e. the realm of thirdness), thus not searching for the cause or meaning of sensations. In the examples presented in this paper, the interpretations of experiences as connected to Buddhist tenets take place through discursive reflexivity that follows meditation practice.
Mahasatipatthāna Sutta, (1985) India: Vipassana Research Institute, p. 15
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Claudio Benzecry, Monika Krause and two anonymous reviewers for constructive insights and suggestions on an earlier draft. This research was supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the Lady Davis foundation.
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Pagis, M. From Abstract Concepts to Experiential Knowledge: Embodying Enlightenment in a Meditation Center. Qual Sociol 33, 469–489 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-010-9169-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-010-9169-6