Explores yoga and meditation in Eastern religions, incorporating psychological and social aspects of these practices.
A historical and comparative study grounded in close readings of important works, this book explores the dynamics of the theory and practice of yoga in Hindu and Buddhist contexts. Author Stuart Ray Sarbacker explores the fascinating, contrasting perceptions that meditation leads to the attainment of divine, or numinous, power, and to complete escape from worldly existence, or cessation. Sarbacker demonstrates that these two dimensions of spiritual experience have affected the doctrine and cultural significance of yoga from its origins to its contemporary practice. He also integrates sociological and psychological perspectives on religious experience into a larger phenomenological model to address the multifaceted nature of religious experience. Speaking to a broad range of methodological and contextual issues, Samadhi provides numerous insights into the theory and practice of yoga that are relevant to both scholars of religious studies and practitioners of contemporary yoga and meditation traditions.
Samadhi: The Numinous and Cessative in Indo-Tibetan Yoga , Stuart Ray Sarbacker, SUNY Press, Hardcover, 2005, 187 Pages, $60.00
STUART RAY SARBACKER is Lecturer in Religion at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.
Acknowledgments. ix
Introduction
Method and the Study of Meditation. 1
1. Sources and Definitions. 13
2. Reinterpreting Religious Experience. 27
3. Yoga, Shamanism, and Buddhism: A New Phenomenology. 53
4. The Debate over Dialogue: Classical Yoga and Buddhism in Comparison. 75
5. Traditions in Transition: Meditative Concepts in the Development of Tantric Sadhana. 111
Conclusion
Meditation, Phenomenology, and the Concept of Samadhi. 127
Notes. 137
Bibliography. 163
Index. 179
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