Abstract
In his influential, landmark, 1995 paper Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, American Buddhologist Robert Sharf critiqued what he perceived as an inappropriate application of the hermeneutic of experience within the modern study of Buddhism. For Sharf, the Buddhist tradition was erroneously read as being centred on and reducible to an experience cultivated through the practice of meditation. In this thesis I question both Sharf’s historical readings of the supposedly insignificant role of meditation and meditative experience in the premodern Buddhist tradition and his alternative understanding of the Buddhist tradition as being centred solely on the practice of “ritual”.Divided into two parts, the thesis firstly examines and critiques Sharf’s historical
imagination, locating his paper in its contemporary intellectual contexts, while identifying the metaphysical and epistemological assumptions – those of materialism, postmodernism, and rationalism – which, in my analysis, inform and shape his particular reading of the premodern Buddhist tradition. In the second part, I argue for the clear centrality of meditation practice and meditative experience to the Buddhist path to awakening. Establishing the gradual path to awakening found in the Sāmaññaphala-sutta of the Pali canon as depicting a normative account of the Buddhist path, I directly challenge, through close analysis of the text, Sharf’s
claim that meditative experiences were nothing more than colourful narratives or
schematizations of a discourse. Instead I argue that such accounts clearly and meaningfully refer to actual intended practices and to the cultivation of altered states of consciousness. The thesis amounts to an attempt to rehabilitate the much maligned category of meditative experience, taking into account the profound role played by the socio-historical contexts within which meditation practice and meditative experiences occur, while allowing for the possibility of a type of knowledge and mode of knowing that cannot simply be reduced to those contexts.
| Date of Award | 10 Dec 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
| Awarding Institution |
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| Supervisor | Rupert M L Gethin (Supervisor) & Rita E M Langer (Supervisor) |