Contemplative Traditions: Reading lists

Japan planning trip:

Sacred Koyasan: A Pilgrimage to the Mountain Temple of Saint Kobo Daishi and the Great Sun Buddha, Philip L. Nicoloff, 2007.

Silent spaces: A history of contemplation in the West

Neural correlates of a mystical experience in Carmelite nuns. Mario Beauregard & Vincent Paquette, Neuroscience Letters 405 (2006) 186–190

About the course

Meditation is a hot commodity in contemporary American popular culture. Ever widening circles of people are becoming interested in the benefits that meditation can offer in stress-‐relief, regulation of blood pressure, pain control, and so on. But what of salvation? While meditation is often seen as a neutral technology, free of ties to any one spiritual path or worldview, we will examine the practice through the cosmological and soteriological contexts that gave rise to it. This course examines a great variety of discourses surrounding meditation in traditional Buddhist texts. While meditation may seem to be something that there is not much to say about, we shall find that in ancient texts as well as in modern scholarship, much ink has been spilled on the topic.

The 360 course comprises three classes that share an interest in contemplative or mindfulness traditions and practice. The course brings together historical, cultural, psychological and religious perspectives in its study of mindful and contemplative traditions. Mindfulness is an important aspect of Eastern religious and Christian monastic traditions. With its recent introduction as a key component of Western therapeutic attempts to remediate psychological difficulties or cope with stress, it has also become a central focus of much psychological research and theory.

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Reading lists