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...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
2024
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| 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 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| 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. |
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| ISSN: | 1469-901X |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religious studies
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S003441252300032X |