Esoteric Theravada
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Shambhala Publications12/27/2022Pages: 495ISBN: 9781645472155DetailsListen to Sample
A groundbreaking exploration of a practice tradition that was nearly lost to history.
Theravada Buddhism, often understood as the school that most carefully preserved the practices taught by the Buddha, has undergone tremendous change over time. Prior to Western colonialism in Asia—which brought Western and modernist intellectual concerns, such as the separation of science and religion, to bear on Buddhism—there existed a tradition of embodied, esoteric, and culturally regional Theravada meditation practices. This once-dominant traditional meditation system, known as borān kammatthāna, is related to—yet remarkably distinct from—Vipassana and other Buddhist and secular mindfulness practices that would become the hallmark of Theravada Buddhism in the twentieth century. Drawing on a quarter century of research, scholar Kate Crosby offers the first holistic discussion of borān kammatthāna, illuminating the historical events and cultural processes by which the practice has been marginalized in the modern era.
Running time: 8 hours, 15 minutesRelatedCheck items to add to the cart orAuthor BioKATE CROSBY is Professor of Buddhist Studies in the department of Theology and Religious Studies at King's College, London. She has previously held posts at the universities of Edinburgh, Lancaster, Cardiff, and SOAS, London. Educated at Oxford, Hamburg, and Kelaniya, in Pune and Varanasi, she works on Sanskrit, Pali, and Pali-vernacular literature and on Theravada practice in the pre-modern and modern periods. She is interested in the history of the relationship between Buddhism and other technologies and how varying responses to modernity influenced the shape, rhetoric, and practice of Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Her publications include The Bodhicaryavatara; Dead of Night & The Women; and Theravada Buddhism: Continuity, Diversity, Identity.