Contemplative traditions
Contemplative traditions are the contemplative strands within religions: communities that hand down practices such as meditation, prayer and purification, rooted in particular places and ways of life. The scholar Louis Komjathy uses the term in contrast to looser talk of "wisdom traditions" or "spirituality".[1]
What is a tradition?
The word comes from Latin tradere, "to carry over", and the sociologist Shils defined a tradition as anything handed down.[2] The historian Pelikan put the difference memorably: "Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." The philosopher MacIntyre saw a tradition as a set of practices together with a way of understanding why they matter.[2] Traditions are not static; Komjathy stresses "traditioning", the ongoing work of passing them on.[2]
Invented traditions
Komjathy also uses Hobsbawm and Ranger's idea of "invented traditions", whose claimed continuity with the past is "largely fictitious". His examples include American Yoga, "Tibetan singing bowls" and Traditional Chinese Medicine.[2] The case of yoga is a striking overlap between religion and the history of exercise. Classical Yoga, as taught in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras ("Yoga is the stilling of the changing states of the mind"), aims at the separation of spirit from matter and is, in Komjathy's description, body-negating. Modern postural yoga, by contrast, draws largely on European callisthenics and gymnastics, as the historians De Michelis and Singleton have shown.[3]
Place, community and monasticism
Komjathy argues that contemplative practice is embodied and tied to place. It has often gone together with asceticism, hermit life and monasticism: examples include the Carthusians of the Grande Chartreuse, filmed in Into Great Silence (2005), and the Hesychast monasteries of Mount Athos.[1] He compares long-term practice to a pilgrimage, with a map, a guide and a destination.[1]
Every major religion has contemplative strains, including Buddhist, Christian, Confucian, Daoist, Hindu, Islamic, Jain, Jewish and Sikh ones.[3] Japanese Shinto offers misogi, purification under waterfalls or in rivers, with parallels Komjathy draws to the Kumbh Mela and Muslim ablution (wudu). Shugendo, a mountain religion whose practitioners are called yamabushi ("mountain dwellers"), uses fasting, waterfalls and caves. Komjathy contrasts the world-affirming outlook of these traditions with the transcendent aim of classical Yoga, and notes that the difference has consequences for how people treat the environment.[3]
Emerging traditions
Komjathy describes newer movements as "emerging traditions", mostly individualistic, wary of institutions and often invented. He sorts them into five kinds:[4]
- Ecumenical, such as the 1971 Rothko Chapel conference and later interreligious monastic dialogues.
- Spiritualist, including "spiritual but not religious" seekers and earlier figures such as Blavatsky of Theosophy, Vivekananda, Yogananda and Alan Watts. Komjathy quotes the description of spirituality as "the religion of no religion".
- Secular, including somatic methods like the Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais, and therapies such as Benson's Relaxation Response and Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction.
- Technological, the laboratory study of meditation from EEG to brain scanning, including the Mind & Life Institute's dialogues between the Dalai Lama and scientists. Critics warn of reducing practice to brain states.
- Meditational, the mindfulness movement, a term Komjathy calls "so nebulous as to be almost meaningless".
Transcendental Meditation, popularised in the 1950s and made famous by the Beatles, also shaped early meditation science.[4] Komjathy warns, with Carrette and King, against "spiritual colonialism" and "spiritual capitalism", which treat religious methods as "resources" and traditions as "trappings", and suggests that the academic field of contemplative studies may itself be an emerging tradition.[4]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Komjathy, Louis (2017). "Contemplative Traditions". Introducing Contemplative Studies. Wiley Blackwell. section "Contemplative Traditions".
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Komjathy, Louis (2017). "Contemplative Traditions". Introducing Contemplative Studies. Wiley Blackwell. section "Tradition, Traditioning, and Traditionalization".
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Komjathy, Louis (2017). "Contemplative Traditions". Introducing Contemplative Studies. Wiley Blackwell. section "Contemplative Strains of Religious Traditions".
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Komjathy, Louis (2017). "Contemplative Traditions". Introducing Contemplative Studies. Wiley Blackwell. section "'Emerging Traditions'".