Meditation in the Pali Social Imaginary I

Early Buddhist meditation, as described in the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta, can be understood as a practice that disrupts habitual, tacit patterns of experience to bring them into conscious awareness and intentional direction. This process helps monastics cultivate specific ways of being, training desires, aesthetic sensibilities, and interpretive categories to create an alternative habitus—a habitual, embodied way of being in the world. The chapter connects these ideas to phenomenology and cognitive science, which distinguish between conscious effort and habitual activity rooted in cultural context.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract This chapter brings early Buddhist meditation literature—especially the Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta—into conversation with ideas in phenomenology and cognitive science that address the distinction between conscious, effortful activity and habitual activity rooted in the tacit assumptions, dispositions, and categories of a particular cultural context. Some meditation practices disrupt the tacit level of experience in order to bring it to explicit cognition and intentional direction. Part of their original purpose was to help consciously cultivate particular ways of being in the world for Buddhist monastics and to habituate them to the categories, orientations, and sensibilities recommended for monastic life, fostering explicit awareness of the habitual flow of experience and activity in order to reconfigure this activity and reinterpret its significance. Meditation in this sense entails training desires, aesthetic sensibilities, and categories through which to interpret one’s experience, creating an alternative habitus—a habitual, embodied way of being in the world.