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Sacred Correspondences

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Tradition

This page groups practices by the culture that gives them their inherited meaning. Wikipedia notes that Roman religious cultus was "an activity fundamental to Roman identity even when Rome as a political center had become fully urbanized." Browsing by tradition lets a visitor read every practice belonging to one culture together, rather than finding them scattered by category.

Facts

Overview

What Defines This Grouping

Disciplines 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 Is

The 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 Category

Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed 5

Directory

Category

Practices 1

Contested Use

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Several 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.

Tradition

24 entries

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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

Erik Braun, University of Chicago Press, 2013View the Source

5. Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience

Robert H. Sharf, Numen, 1995View the Source

Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions

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