A Buddhist's guide to self-destruction: Jñānaśrīmitra on the structure of yogic perception

This article explores the structure of cultivated religious experience. For the Buddhist philosopher Jñānaśrīmitra (c. 980-1040), the religious experience of the Buddhist yogin (yogipratyakṣa) is not spontaneous or sporadic but must be intentionally and rationally cultivated. I argue that Jñānaśrīmi...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Tomlinson, Davey K. (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Cambridge Univ. Press 2024
In: Religious studies
Year: 2024, Volume: 60, Issue: 2, Pages: 219-234
Further subjects:B Religious Experience
B Buddhism
B transformative experience
B yogic perception
B Buddhist epistemology
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Summary:This article explores the structure of cultivated religious experience. For the Buddhist philosopher Jñānaśrīmitra (c. 980-1040), the religious experience of the Buddhist yogin (yogipratyakṣa) is not spontaneous or sporadic but must be intentionally and rationally cultivated. I argue that Jñānaśrīmitra's picture parallels certain contemporary constructivist accounts of religious experience, according to which the prejudices, expectations, and interpretative structures of the practitioner shape the character of the experience in question. Despite this, however, Jñānaśrīmitra maintains that religious experience is direct, non-conceptual, and ineffable. Even though cultivation begins by focusing on rationally understood, effable conceptual content (the Buddha's teaching of the Four Nobles' Truths, for instance), the yogin's relation to that content is transformed through cultivation (bhāvanā). Cultivation makes awareness-events with conceptual content vivid (spaṣṭa) in such a way that they lose their conceptual character, coming to affect the practitioner's mind as if they were external to it. In this way, precisely in virtue of beginning the process of cultivation with certain expectations about the Buddha's teaching, Buddhist yogins come to have a direct and non-conceptual experience of the breakdown of their own mental streams and the dissolution of the sense of self.
ISSN:1469-901X
Contains:Enthalten in: Religious studies
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1017/S003441252300032X