Esoteric Theravada

The Story of the Forgotten Meditation Tradition of Southeast Asia

Esoteric Theravada
Kate Crosby
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NZ$ 45.00
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Paperback
h216 x 140mm - 256pg
22 Dec 2020 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9781611807943
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In this groundbreaking book, scholar Kate Crosby illuminates the once-dominant traditional Theravada meditation system known as boran kammatthana. Theravada Buddhism, though often understood as the school that most carefully preserved the practices originally taught by the Buddha, has in fact undergone tremendous change over time. Prior to Western concerns with the separation of science and religion that influenced Asian Buddhist modernizers, there existed a tradition of embodied, esoteric, and culturally regional Theravada meditation practices. These meditation systems differ radically from the reformed, text-based meditations that are now taught in Theravada Buddhism, including vipassana, or insight meditation. Drawing on a quarter century of research, Crosby offers the first holistic discussion of boran kammatthana in the context of historical events and cultural processes by which the practice has been marginalized in the modern era. Readers of Esoteric Theravada will never see Theravada Buddhism in the same light again.
"This book is one of the most important works on the history of Southeast Asian and Southern Buddhist meditation for decades. It shows how a whole tradition of practice, meditation, and mindfulness was lost--almost--in the wave of interest in Buddhism for its "scientific" and rational elements over the last hundred and fifty years. The Boran Kamatthana is the living meditative tradition of Cambodia and Thailand. Until only a few decades ago, it was taught throughout these regions. Crosby' s book shows how this expressive, embodied system of samatha/vipassana meditation constitutes the oldest documented lineage of Buddhist practice in South and Southeast Asia. Belittled by modernist impulses, the system offers a complete path of spiritual development that works on principles found in South and Southeast Asian generative grammar, medicine, yantra, and the Abhidhamma. This account of how Boran Kamatthana originated as an enactment of Asian generative systems is brilliant, concise, and revelatory. Boran Kamatthana is scientific, but in ways steeped in highly sophisticated ancient models of grammar and medicine colonialists did not understand. Reformist agendas, still active today, undermined its rich meditative line: Crosby' s work is essential reading for anyone interested in a true picture of traditional Buddhist practice in these regions. Esoteric Theravada rewrites the recent history of Southern Buddhist meditation. "--Sarah Shaw, author of Mindfulness: Where It Comes From and What It Means"Professor Crosby' s book sheds new light on a vitally important yet neglected--at times even suppressed--system of meditative practice in South and Southeast Asia. Her work reveals forms of meditation, once widely practiced though now nearly extinct, that diverge sharply from the techniques and even the mindset of the insight practices (vipassana) dominant today. Deeply researched and lucidly written, Esoteric Theravada is necessary reading for anyone interested in Theravada Buddhist philosophy (Abhidhamma), the interfaces of scientific learning and practices of self-cultivation, and the history of Buddhist meditation. "--Erik Braun, author of The Birth of Insight and coeditor of Meditation, Buddhism, and Science"Dr. Crosby' s new book on traditional Theravada meditation signals a new direction in the history of South and Southeast Asian Buddhism. She has uncovered, through an intense interrogation of rare materials, an entire lineage of meditation teachers, methods, and existential ratiocinations that have been neglected by scholars. She effectively cauterizes a wound in the field and will lead a new generation of scholars to a fuller and more nuanced understanding of the relation between the body and the mind in regional Buddhist practice. "--Justin Thomas McDaniel, Professor of Buddhist studies, University of Pennsylvania "Crosby' s acribic detective work has uncovered the principles of a hitherto almost forgotten meditation tradition that was called ' the old practices' (Boran Kamatthana). The principles of Boran Kamatthana are hidden in texts abounding with metaphors and substitutions. Crosby unravels and explains these texts by entering thought modes of preindustrial times, mapping correspondences between parts of the body and mystical ideas, and using letter, sound, and number symbolism. By showing us ' the old practices, ' Crosby lays to rest the myth of a pure authentic original Theravada tradition, a myth that too long obscured the diversity of the past. "--Barend Jan Terwiel, Emeritus Professor of Thai and Lao Languages and Literatures, Hamburg University "Kate Crosby' s Esoteric Theravada is a fascinating and wide-ranging treatment of traditional Boran Kammatthana style meditation in Theravada Buddhism. Readable and accessible to anyone interested in meditation and an absolute goldmine for historians of Buddhism, this remarkable study of a meditation tradition, its texts, technologies, and the history of its decline gives us insight into the profound thought worlds of Buddhists who were on the ' losing' side of the modernist reforms of Buddhism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Crosby' s rare combination of painstaking historical research, linguistic prowess, and engrossing ethnographic interviews in combination with her own experience as a practitioner of Boran meditation deftly opens up an important strand of the Theravada tradition that has too often been lost from view. "--Anne Hansen, Professor of Southeast Asian History & Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison
KATE CROSBY is Professor of Buddhist Studies in the department of Theology and Religious Studies at King' s College, London. She has previously held posts at the universities of Edinburgh, Lancaster, Cardiff, and SOAS, London. Educated at Oxford, Hamburg, and Kelaniya, in Pune and Varanasi, she works on Sanskrit, Pali, and Pali-vernacular literature and on Theravada practice in the pre-modern and modern periods. She is interested in the history of the relationship between Buddhism and other technologies and how varying responses to modernity influenced the shape, rhetoric, and practice of Theravada Buddhism in Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia. Her publications include The Bodhicaryavatara; Dead of Night & The Women; and Theravada Buddhism- Continuity, Diversity, Identity.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781611807943
Published: 22 Dec 2020
Published In: United States
Imprint: Shambhala Publications Inc
Publisher: Shambhala Publications Inc
Format: Paperback
Height: 216mm
Width: 140mm
Pages: 256

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