Knowing body, moving mind: ritualizing and learning at two buddhist centers

Knowing Body, Moving Mind explores ritualizing and learning in meditation classes at two Buddhist centers in Toronto. Based on interviews with students and teachers, it explores the ways formal Buddhist practices generate learning; discovering that body and mind together gain new skills and understanding by way of embodied, gestural rites. Knowing Body, Moving Mind investigates ritualizing and learning in introductory meditation classes at two Buddhist centers in Toronto, Canada. The centers, Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti, are ledand attended by Western (sometimes called "convert') Buddhists: that is, people from non-Buddhist familial and cultural backgrounds. Inspired by theories that suggest that rituals impart new knowledge or understanding, Patricia Campbell examines how introductory meditationstudents learn through formal Buddhist practice. Along the way, she also explores practitioners' reasons for enrolling in meditation classes, their interests in Buddhism, and their responses to formal Buddhist practices and to ritualin general.Based on ethnographic interviews and participant-observation fieldwork, the text follows interview participants' reflections on what they learned in meditation classes and through personal practice, and what roles meditation and other ritual practices played in that learning. Participants' learning experiencesare illuminated by an influential learning theory called Bloom's Taxonomy, while the rites and practices taught and performed at the centers are explored using performance theory, amethod which focuses on the performative elements of ritual's postures and gestures. But the study expands the performance framework as well, by demonstrating that performative ritualizing includes the concentration techniques that take place in a meditator's mind.Such techniques are received as traditional mental acts or behaviors that arestandardized, repetitively performed, and variously regarded as special, elevated, spiritual or religious. Having established a link between mental and physical forms of ritualizing, the study then demonstrates that the repetitive mental techniques of meditation practice train the mind to develop new skills inthe same way that physical postures and gestures train the body. The mind is thus experienced as bothembodied and gestural, and the whole of the body as socially and ritually informed. IntroductionChapter One: Friends of the Heart and Chandrakirti Centre: Meditation in Toronto Friends of the Heart Chandrakirti Centre OutreachChapter Two: Discovery Stories Why Take a Meditation Class?Chapter Three: Meditation Classes, Rites, and Ritual Rites of Entry Opening Prayer Meditation Talks or Lectures Group Discussion and Socializing Closing Rites Ritual and Introductory Meditation Classes Ritualization and Ritualizing Performance Theory and Restoration of Behavior ConclusionChapter Four: Beyond Knowledge Bloom's Taxonomy Cognitive Learning Affective Learning Psychomotor Learning A Fourth Domain? "Practice" as Changing Behavior ConclusionChapter Five: The Ritualizing Body-Mind Ritualizing and Decorum Prostrations Learning, Experimentation and InvarianceCognitive Learning and Ritualizing Ritualizing and Meditation Meditation and Embodied Knowing ConclusionChapter Six: Learning is Change Newcomers, Learning and Change Teacher's ObjectivesConclusionAppendix: Student Interview Participants by NameNotesBibliography

• ISBN: 978-0-19-979382-2
• Editorial: Oxford University
• Encuadernacion: Cartoné
• Páginas: 250
• Fecha Publicación: 13/10/2011
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés