Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies

Suzanne Newcombe, Karen O'Brien-Kop, Suzanne Newcombe, Karen O'Brien-Kop

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351050739
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Scienze biologiche
• Categoría: Scienze motorie e sportive

The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies is a comprehensive and interdisciplinary resource, which frames and contextualises the rapidly expanding fields that explore yoga and meditative techniques. The book analyses yoga and meditation studies in a variety of religious, historical and geographical settings. The chapters, authored by an international set of experts, are laid out across five sections:

• Introduction to yoga and meditation studies

• History of yoga and meditation in South Asia

• Doctrinal perspectives: technique and praxis

• Global and regional transmissions

• Disciplinary framings

In addition to up-to-date explorations of the history of yoga and meditation in the Indian subcontinent, new contexts include a case study of yoga and meditation in the contemporary Tibetan diaspora, and unique summaries of historical developments in Japan and Latin America as well as an introduction to the growing academic study of yoga in Korea. Underpinned by critical and theoretical engagement, the volume provides an in-depth guide to the history of yoga and meditation studies and combines the best of established research with attention to emerging directions for future investigation. This handbook will be of interest to multidisciplinary academic audiences from across the humanities, social sciences and sciences.

Chapters 1, 4, 9, 12, and 27 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Part I

Introduction to yoga and meditation studies

The overall aim of this section – and the volume as a whole – is to think about what can be gained by reflecting on meditation and yoga together as closely related (and overlapping) techniques. Here we highlight some of the main themes and contexts in which the academic study of yoga and meditation currently exists.

In particular, we want to draw attention to the contemporary, global, postcolonial and neoliberal social contexts and power structures in which we all operate. But, additionally, we want to emphasise the importance of recognising the complex relationships between individual scholars’ identities and the construction of academic debates and disciplines.

1

Reframing yoga and meditation studies

Karen O’Brien-Kop and Suzanne Newcombe

Introduction

The study of yoga and meditation is not new. The techniques that we now associate with the terms ‘meditation’ and ‘yoga’ are documented over thousands of years in nuanced explorations by practitioners and theorists. However, the ‘outsider’ study of these practices is intimately connected with the knowledge construction projects of European modernity. As the Peruvian philosopher Aníbal Quijano (amongst others) has pointed out, modernity was, for the majority of the world, an experience of coloniality; the conceptual frameworks of European modernity co-arise with the experiences, cultural oppressions and transformations of colonisation (Quijano 2000). In many ways our understandings of practices of meditation and yoga, and their popularised meanings, have been filtered and distorted through the epistemic frameworks that have become dominant and globalised during this period. By examining the study of meditation and yoga through a range of disciplines and in a number of specific cultural and historical contexts, we hope to begin a conversation that challenges assumptions created by cultural positioning, disciplinary training and the blind spots to which they almost inevitably give rise.

This volume is aimed at students and educators and aspires to showcase the range, depth and complexity of current, global academic research on yoga and meditation. As such, this volume mostly takes the stance of the ‘outsider’ perspective to the study of yoga and meditation, although it does include many insider, theological and blended viewpoints. In the past few decades and in line with the rapid expansion of globalised meditation and yoga, there has been a correlative increase in academic studies of yoga and meditation from a range of perspectives. Recent research has been published not only from within established disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, indology, religious studies and medical-based science, but also from newly emerging and interdisciplinary approaches, such as political theory (Kale and Novetzske forthcoming) or critical and cultural race studies (e.g. Gandhi forthcoming). The increased academic interest reflects that yoga and meditation studies is significantly shifting from a submerged sub-field within selected disciplines to a visible field of study in its own right, one that is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary and increasingly transregional.

The chapters in this volume not only consolidate the contemporary field of academic knowledge on yoga and meditation, but also push the boundaries of existing research and explore emerging and future directions of study. By investigating the meanings and assumptions behind practices associated with yoga and meditation in a variety of contexts, in specific historical periods and through different theological and disciplinary lenses, the authors of this volume contribute to a breaking up of siloed knowledge and rigid conceptual frameworks.

Historically, the field of yoga and meditation studies has not developed evenly. By the end of the twentieth century, academic study of Buddhism and meditation was firmly established in university departments of area studies and in selected humanities disciplines such as religious studies – and was increasingly a subject of biomedical/psycho-physical studies. However, the academic study of yoga traditions has only just emerged as a distinct category of research in the twenty-first century. This handbook is one of the first attempts to bring into direct dialogue two closely related areas of academic research: meditation and yoga. At times this dialogue has been easier to initiate than at other times – since, for some of the scholars whom we invited, the disciplinary areas of expertise, the questions asked and the assumptions made about their objects of study made it hard to see how their particular scholarly agenda would benefit from being part of interdisciplinary reflections.

In an effort to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and awareness between contributors, we organised an authors’ workshop in early 2019, held in London, UK, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) with support from the Open University.¹ In this forum, scholars exchanged comments on the first-draft papers, with the intention of creating a more coherent volume. This workshop was closely informed and supported by two interdisciplinary European Research Council funded projects on the history of yoga in South Asia, namely AYURYOG and the Haṭha Yoga Project. Both of these projects sought to cultivate interdisciplinary methods to shine new light on their subjects through longue durée lenses. For AYURYOG, this was to examine the histories and entanglements of yoga, ayurveda and rasaśāstra (alchemy and iatrochemistry) from the tenth century to the present, focusing on the disciplines’ health, rejuvenation and longevity practices. For the Haṭha Yoga Project, the concern was how to identify the origins of both haṭha and modern yoga through multidisciplinary approaches of philology, ethnography and cultural history – and at times forging interdisciplinary approaches such as ‘embodied philology’, the interpretation of historical texts on āsana with the aid (and limits) of contemporary practitioner bodies. The diversity of the discussion over the course of these two days was inspiring. We hope that the new perspectives generated will have ripple effects on the framing of many of the participants’ research beyond the scope of this particular volume.

Both of the editors of this volume work primarily in the field of yoga studies and, although we have aimed to include a broad range of approaches from the field of meditation and contemplative studies, we acknowledge that the content is slightly more weighted towards the topic of yoga. While some chapters are interdisciplinary (see, for instance, Li, Chapter 26, which integrates philology and digital humanities), other chapters are multidisciplinary (Bühnemann, Chapter 29, combines art history, material culture and religious studies) or cross-disciplinary (Gerety, Chapter 34, in part, employs sound studies to elucidate history of religions).² However, in the last section of the book, which focuses on ‘disciplinary framings’ we also see that the understanding of what yoga or meditation is and does can shift depending on the questions asked and methods of research. For example, a focus on measurable characteristics in psychophysiology yields a different understanding of yoga and meditation than exploring the social context of yoga with the tools of critical theory. The scope of this volume’s essays from scholars around the world ensures that a considerable range of perspectives has been included from across the combined field of yoga and meditation studies and that there is ample opportunity for readers to think and analyse laterally across these complex and intertwined topics, regions, approaches and chronologies.

As editors, we also acknowledge that we are situated in the humanities and social sciences, primarily as scholars of religion. The hard sciences are not represented to the extent that we would have liked, but we have two excellent dedicated science-based chapters, one on biomedicine (Chapter 30) and one on cognitive psychology (Chapter 31), as well as a range of scientific perspectives incorporated in other chapters. It is worth reflecting on the institutionalised structures of knowledge, reward and research finance in this area: many of the scientists that we reached out to were unwilling to commit to publishing in a cross-disciplinary forum and to a publishing format – an edited collection – which is singular to the humanities and social sciences. In the hard sciences, the outputs for hard-won research hours are standard science journal articles (usually by large teams of co-researchers). Often research into health interventions (which is a common focus for yoga and meditation studies in these disciplines) also need to demonstrate the potential to generate or at least to save money in the context of the healthcare market. The academic environment is therefore increasingly driven by constrained research outputs and specific research funding opportunities. An important challenge for social science and humanities researchers going forward is to impress upon both biomedical researchers and the general public the importance of understanding health interventions in context – that their healing and meaning-giving potential cannot be reduced to, or fully understood by, biomedical measurements. Conversely, it can also be helpful for humanities and ‘soft’ science scholars to have a better understanding of how the body is likely to react to certain psycho-physical techniques and what this might mean for the social construction of traditions and ontological understandings of reality.

Defining meditation and yoga: the challenges

Across this collection, scholars have grappled with central questions, themes and tensions inherent in studying these subjects in the contemporary world and from within the often Euro- and America-centric academic traditions. First and foremost among our projects has been the exploration and problematising of the very definitions of terms such as ‘yoga’, ‘meditation’, ‘contemplation’, and spiritual ‘discipline’ across chronology, region and religious categories. We have long since moved beyond the twentieth-century view of yoga and meditation as ‘timeless’ or ‘universal’ traditions of the ‘Mystic East’ (see King 1999). Rather, when we probe more deeply, we discover the many nuances of these somewhat general terms and that there are multiple definitions and accounts of yoga and meditation that are particular to specific contexts.

When a scholar sets out to formally define ‘yoga’ and/or ‘meditation’ there are many challenges to confront, not least at the basic level of language. For example, scholars encounter translation difficulties, such as which words may reasonably be translated as ‘meditation’ from different languages. While dhyāna in Sanskrit, jìngzuò (静坐) in Japanese, and shouyi (守一) in Chinese Daoist discourse are often translated into English with the word ‘meditation’, more technically they denote ‘absorption’ (dhyāna), ‘quiet sitting’ (jìngzuò), and ‘guarding the one’ (shouyi). It is equally possible to assert that these varied practices are entirely disparate and disconnected and should not be grouped under the umbrella term of ‘meditation.’ The scholar faces similarly challenging philological choices: e.g. did yogācāra mean ‘discipline of yoga’ for classical South Asian Buddhists or something generic such as ‘spiritual conduct’? What happens to an experiential categorisation of samādhi as a singular type of ‘meditative concentration’ when some Mahāyāna Buddhist texts note that types of samādhis run, numerically, into the millions? (See Deleanu, Chapter 7.) Furthermore, one has to negotiate semantic change and slippage across time and language: be it within a Sanskrit text or as a borrowed word, what does yoga denote in different cultures, languages and eras? Finally, contemporary definitions often eclipse historical definitions and can lead to anachronistic, misinformed or simply skewed understandings of the past discussions of yoga as recorded in textual sources. On the other hand, contemporary definitions of yoga and identities within particular meditative traditions can be weighed down by the ideological anchor of historical ‘authenticity’ with no room for organic change and development in meaning or understanding.

Then there are the challenges of defining a practice of ‘yoga’ or ‘meditation’. Is yoga a means to an end (a set of techniques) or the goal itself (the end state of liberation)? Where does ritual end and meditation begin? (Is lighting a candle a ritual act or a meditative act, or both?) How do we, as scholars, reconstruct past or present practices of yoga and meditation, taking into account the dilemmas of the etic/emic perspectives and the often thorny topic of insider and outsider identities and statuses? Furthermore, what are our presumptions about practice in relation to yoga and meditation? If yoga is understood as primarily characterised by ‘visible’ practices such as posture and breathing technique, then is meditation understood as an inner or ‘invisible’ set of techniques? Do the categories of ‘meditation’ and ‘yoga’ re...