Psychodynamics of Meditation: Pitfalls on the Spiritual Path
نویسنده
چکیده
One of the things that initially attracted me to Buddhist thought and practices was the widespread description of Buddhism as the Middle Path or the Middle Way, denoting a central course between the extremes of asceticism and indulgence arrived at by the Buddha in his years of practice. Philosophically, I have also become increasingly impressed with the teachings of one of the major schools of Buddhist thought, known as the Madhyamika, or Central Way, originating in the efforts of Nagarjuna, around the second century A.D., to chart a conceptual course unafflicted by either absolutism or nihilism, two tendencies of human thought that are difficult to avoid. These two great poles, a belief in an abiding, absolute, unchanging, eternal principle (a godhead, a self or an ultimate beyond) on the one hand, and nihilistic rejection or skepticism on the other, represent the philosophical outgrowths of the human tendency to reify either the one or the zero, the Self or the no-Self, Being or Nothingness. As a way out of such limiting habits of thought, the Buddha taught that there was neither self, nor no-self (Murti, 1955, p. 7); his philosophy encouraged the de-reification (Thurman, 1984, p. 7) of both the absolute and the material. As developed by a succession of great Madhyamika scholars first in India and later in Tibet, the Central Way philosophy served essentially as a brake on the psychological tendencies of meditators at every stage of development to err on either the side of absolutism or nihilism.
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