This page groups practices by the year their recorded history begins. Wikipedia notes that "the term 'cult' first appeared in English in 1617," even though the underlying Latin concept is far older. Browsing by start year lets a visitor see how far back a practice's documented use in its own language reaches.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingDisciplines of sustained, trained attention - calm abiding, insight, recitation of a formula, visualisation, fixed gazing, contemplative reading and prayer. The English word covers techniques with incompatible aims: samatha and vipassana are distinguished within Buddhism itself, and lectio divina, Sufi muraqabah and Daoist internal alchemy are not one thing under different names. 2 Origins
Whose Classification This IsThe modern comparative category owes much to twentieth-century Buddhist modernism, which recast meditation as a technique separable from monastic life and doctrine and presented it in that form to Western audiences; the Burmese insight movement from Ledi Sayadaw onward is the clearest case. 4 Status
Standing as a Comparative CategoryUsed, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 5 Contested Use
Contested or Appropriated Modern UseSeveral of these disciplines now circulate detached from the traditions that transmit them - mindfulness as a secular clinical and corporate technique, yoga as exercise, meditation as a movement in its own right - and the detachment is itself contested by practitioners and by scholars. 3 Learn More
The Meditative Practices
This group holds meditative practices, the disciplines of stilling, focusing or training the mind, from breath awareness and mantra recitation to visualisation and contemplative absorption. Such practices are especially developed in the Indian and Buddhist traditions but appear across many religions.
The browser will find meditative practices from various traditions. The entries describe each practice's technique, aim and lineage, noting how differently the traditions understand the goal of meditation.
4th century BCE
Filter Results3 entries
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. MeditationView the Source 3. Transcendent in America: Hindu-Inspired Meditation Movements as New Religion
Lola Williamson, New York University Press, 2010
4. The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw
5. Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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