The scientific study of Buddhist forms of meditation has surged in recent years, capturing the popular imagination and reshaping conceptions of what meditation is and what it can do. For perhaps the first time in history, meditation has shifted from Buddhist monasteries and practice centers to some of the most prominent and powerful modern institutions in the world, as well as non-institutional settings. As their contexts change, so do the practices-sometimes drastically. New ways of thinking about meditation are emerging as it moves toward more secular settings, ways that profoundly affect millions of lives all over the world.

To understand these changes and their effects, the essays in this volume explore the unaddressed complexities in the interrelations between Buddhist history and thought and the scientific study of meditation. The contributors bring philosophical, cultural, historical, and ethnographic perspectives to bear, considering such issues as the philosophical presuppositions behind practice, the secularization of meditation, the values and goods assumed in clinical approaches, and the sorts of subjects that take shape under the influence of these transformed and transformative practices-all the more powerful for being so often formulated with the authority of scientific discourse.

Meditation, Buddhism, and Science; David L. McMahan and Erik Braun (editors); Oxford University Press; Paperback; 253 pages; $34.95

David L. McMahan is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He is the editor of Buddhism in the Modern World and author of The Making of Buddhist Modernism and Empty Vision: Metaphor and Visionary Imagery in Mahayana Buddhism.

Erik Braun is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw, which won a Toshihide Numata Book Award in Buddhism.

Contributors:

Erik Braun is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw (University of Chicago Press, 2013). He focuses primarily on Burmese Buddhism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though he also works on matters related to Pali literature and to globalizing forms of meditative practice.

Julia Cassaniti is an Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at Washington State University. Her first book, Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community(Cornell University Press), received the American Anthropological Association's 2016 Stirling Prize for Best Published Book in Psychological Anthropology. Dr. Cassaniti examines the social articulations of religious ideas in the psychology of everyday life in Southeast Asia and around the world, with special attention to their implications for health and well-being.

Joanna Cook is an anthropologist at University College London. She is the author of Meditation in Modern Buddhism: Renunciation and change in Thai Monastic Life (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and the coeditor of The State We're In: Reflecting on Democracy's Troubles (Berghan Books, 2016), Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking (Manchester University Press, 2015) and Southeast Asian Perspectives on Power(Routledge, 2012).

William Edelglass is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Environmental Studies at Marlboro College in Vermont. His research is primarily in the areas of Buddhist philosophy, environmental philosophy, and 20th-century French and German thought. William served as co-director of the International Association of Environmental Philosophy and is now co-editor of the journal Environmental Philosophy. He is also co-editor of Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings, The Oxford Handbook of World Philosophy, and Facing Nature: Levinas and Environmental Thought. He has taught at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies, a federal prison in New York, a Tibetan refugee settlement in Nepal, and the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics, Dharamsala, India.

David L. McMahan is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He is the editor of Buddhism in the Modern World (Routledge 2012) and author of The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford, 2008), Empty Vision: Metaphor and Visionary Imagery in Mahayana Buddhism (Routledge Curzon, 2002), and a number of articles on Mahayana Buddhism in South Asia and Buddhism in the modern world. He has written on Indian Buddhist literature, visual metaphors and practice, the early history of the Mahayana movement in India and, more recently, on the interface of Buddhism and modernity, including its interactions with science, psychology, modernist literature, romanticism, and transcendentalism.

Robert H. Sharf is D. H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Chair of the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He works primarily in the area of medieval Chinese Buddhism (especially Chan), but he also publishes in the areas of Japanese Buddhism, Buddhist art, Buddhist philosophy, ritual studies, and methodological issues in the study of religion. He is author of Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise (2002), and co-editor of Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context(2001).

Evan Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (Columbia University Press, 2015) and Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007). He is also co-author of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991; revised edition 2016).

William Waldron has been teaching courses on Buddhism, Hinduism, and the Study of Religion at Middlebury College in Vermont, since 1996. He received both his B.A. in South Asian Studies and Ph. D. in Buddhist Studies from the University of Wisconsin, after working extensively with native scholars in India, Nepal and Japan, where he continues to do research. His work focuses on Indian Buddhism in general and the Yogacara school in particular. He published a monograph on the Yogacara notion of 'store-house consciousness' (alaya-vijnana) (The Buddhist Unconscious, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), numerous articles comparing Buddhist and modern theories of mind in evolutionary biology, cognitive science and sociology, and is currently completing a book on the theory of cognitive constructivism in Indian Yogacara Buddhism.

Jeff Wilson is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies at Renison University College, University of Waterloo. He is the author of Mindful America: The Mutual Transformation of Buddhist Meditation and American Culture, Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South, and Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America, and co-editor of Selected Works of D.T. Suzuki, Volume III: Comparative Religion.

CONTENTS: Meditation, Buddhism, and Science
Acknowledgments		vii
Contributors		ix
1.	Introduction--From Colonialism to Brainscans: Modern Transformations of Buddhist Meditation David L. McMahan and Erik Braun	1
2.	How Meditation Works: Theorizing the Role of Cultural Context in Buddhist Contemplative Practices David L. McMahan	21
3.	Looping Effects and the Cognitive Science of Mindfulness Meditation Evan Thompson	47
4.	Buddhism, Happiness, and the Science of Meditation William Edelglass	62
5.	Reflections on Indian Buddhist Thought and the Scientific Study of Feditation, or: Why Scientists Should Talk More with Their Buddhist Subjects William S. Waldron	84
6.	"Mind the Gap": Appearance and Reality in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy Joanna Cook	114
7.	"Wherever You Go, There You Aren't?": Non-Self, Spirits, and the Concept of the Person in Thai Buddhist Mindfulness Julia Cassaniti	133
8.	Mindfulness Makes You a Way Better Lover": Mindful Sex and the Adaptation of Buddhism to New Cultural Desires Jeff Wilson	152
9.	Mindful but Not Religious: Meditation and Enchantment in the Work of Jon Kabat-Zinn Erik Braun	173
10.	Is Mindfulness Buddhist? (And Why It Matters) Robert H. Sharf	198
Bibliography		213
Index		239