Knowing Body, Moving Mind: Ritualizing and Learning at Two Buddhist Centers
Patricia Q. Campbell
Abstract
This book investigates ritualizing and learning at introductory meditation classes at two Buddhist centers in Toronto, Canada. The centers, Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti, are led and attended by western Buddhists: that is, people from non-Buddhist familial and cultural backgrounds. Inspired by theories that suggest that rituals impart new knowledge or understanding, the book examines how introductory meditation students learn through formal Buddhist practice. Along the way, it explores practitioners' reasons for enrolling in meditation classes, their interests in Buddhism, and their re ... More
This book investigates ritualizing and learning at introductory meditation classes at two Buddhist centers in Toronto, Canada. The centers, Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti, are led and attended by western Buddhists: that is, people from non-Buddhist familial and cultural backgrounds. Inspired by theories that suggest that rituals impart new knowledge or understanding, the book examines how introductory meditation students learn through formal Buddhist practice. Along the way, it explores practitioners' reasons for enrolling in meditation classes, their interests in Buddhism, and their responses to formal Buddhist rituals. Participants' learning experiences are illuminated by an influential learning theory called Bloom's Taxonomy, while the rites and practices taught and performed at the centers are explored using performance theory, a method which focuses on the performative elements of ritual's postures and gestures. But the study expands the performance framework as well, by demonstrating that performative ritualizing includes the concentration techniques that take place in a meditator's mind. Such techniques are received, traditional mental acts or behaviours that are standardized, repetitively performed, and variously regarded as special, elevated, spiritual, or religious. Having established a link between mental and physical forms of ritualizing, the study demonstrates that body and mind together gain new skills and understanding by way of embodied, gestural rites. The mind is thus experienced as both embodied and gestural, and the whole of the body as socially and ritually informed.
Keywords:
Buddhism,
ethnography,
learning,
meditation,
postures,
techniques,
performance theory,
ritual,
ritualizing,
Western Buddhism
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2011 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199793822 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199793822.001.0001 |
