What Stands in the Way Becomes the Way: Dual and Non-Dual Approaches to Meditation Hindrances in Buddhist Traditions and Contemplative Science
Religions September 11, 2022 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.3390/rel13090840 via Semantic Scholar
Summary
Meditation research often focuses on positive outcomes, but recent studies reveal negative effects may be more common than expected. Different terms like challenging, unpleasant, adverse, and harmful describe these effects. Before unifying these concepts, the notion of meditation hindrances—reactions that impair spiritual progress or access to absorption states—needs clarification. Traditional Buddhist texts and manuals define hindrances and strategies to counteract them. One influential idea treats a hindrance as the path to liberation, blurring the positive-negative distinction. This article overviews meditation hindrances and discusses problems and potential benefits of relativizing this distinction, which could be either harmful or beneficial to practitioners.
Study at a glance
| Design | theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Key finding | The concept of meditation hindrances challenges whether a unified conception of negative effects can be maintained, as one influential idea treats hindrances as the way to liberation, blurring the positive-negative distinction. |
Abstract
Meditation research tends to be focused on positive effects. Recent studies, however, have uncovered a range of potential negative effects, which may be more prevalent than one would expect. Several different conceptions of “negative effects” exist, and such effects are variously termed “challenging”, “unpleasant”, “adverse”, and “harmful”. Before work on a unifying conception of negative effects can begin, the notion of “meditation hindrances” needs to be clarified. Research on meditation hindrances is very scarce. Traditional Buddhist texts and more recent meditation manuals treat different kinds of meditation hindrances, defining them as reactions that impair or halt spiritual progress generally and access to absorption states specifically. Different strategies have been devised as means to renounce or counteract hindrances. However, one influential idea consists of taking a hindrance as the way to liberation, which either makes the distinction between positive and negative ambiguous or collapses it. This makes it questionable whether a unified conception of “negative effect” can be maintained at all. This article gives an overview of the concept of meditation hindrances and discusses both the problems and the potential benefits inherent in the idea of relativizing the distinction between negative and positive effects. Such an idea may be either harmful to practitioners or their greatest asset.