Jhāna consciousness : Buddhist meditation in the age of neuroscience

An interdisciplinary deep dive into Buddhist jhāna meditation and how it can transform our understanding of self and consciousness States of profound meditative concentration, the jhānas are central to the earliest Buddhist teachings. For centuries in Southeast Asia, oral yogāvacara (yoga practitioner) lineages kept traditional jhāna practices alive, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reforms in Theravāda Buddhism downplayed the importance of jhāna in favor of vipassanā (insight) meditation. Some began to consider the jhānas to be strictly the domain of monastics, unattainable in the context of modern lay life. In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the jhānas, and as researcher Paul Dennison shows, the esoteric and sometimes “magical” pre-reform practices of Southeast Asia hold powerful potential for modern lay practitioners living in a more scientifically minded world. Drawing on traditional Buddhist doctrine, teachings from lesser-known meditation texts such as the Yogāvacara’s Manual , and findings from the first in-depth, peer-reviewed neuroscience study of jhāna meditation, Dennison unpacks this ancient practice in all its nuance while posing novel questions about perception, subjectivity, and the nature of enlightenment. "The practice of jhāna, or meditative absorption, is central to the earliest Buddhist teachings. For centuries in Southeast Asia, oral Yogāvacara (yoga practitioner) traditions kept this practice alive, but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reforms in Buddhism suppressed jhāna meditation in favor of vipassana, or insight meditation. The traditional methods of jhāna meditation were nearly lost. In Yogāvacara, Paul Dennison explores these too-long neglected practices from a variety of angles and makes a compelling case for their vital importance to Buddhist practice. Having studied with one of the first Thai meditation teachers in England, practiced for decades in the UK's Samatha Trust meditation tradition, and published a peer-reviewed study on the effects of jhāna meditation on the brain, Paul Dennison brings a lifetime of scholarly and personal insight to a subject that Westerners are only beginning to understand. Employing traditional Buddhist doctrine, teachings from lesser-known meditation texts such as The Yogāvacara's Manual, and findings from his neuroscience research, Yogāvacara offers a vision rooted in the ancient past yet oriented to our present age"-- Provided by publisher.