Word: vipassana
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...Other established schools of Buddhist thought, like vipassana meditation and Tibetan Buddhism, are finding a newly receptive audience India as well. These new Buddhists don't convert officially; they simply take up some form of the practice, usually chanting or meditation, and often continue to observe the same holidays and family rituals they always did. That's another part of Buddhism's appeal in India, Sarao says. In a country where so much of social life revolves around religious festivals and ceremonies, Indians can enjoy the philosophical satisfactions of Buddhism without having to give up the faith they were born...
Increasingly it is being detached from Buddhism. Along with the more obscure Zen techniques (such as sitting for hours in positions that look painful to me and asking to be hit with sticks if you feel you are about to doze off), Americans are trying Vipassana (which begins by focusing on your breath), walking meditation (at first walking really, really slowly and then being hyperaware of each step), Transcendental Meditation (or TM, repeating a Sanskrit syllable over and over), Dzogchen (cultivating a clear but even-keeled awareness) and even trance dance (spinning with a blindfold on for an hour...
Psychologists are trying to discover whether meditation can reprogram minds with an antisocial bent. A study at the Kings County North Rehabilitation Facility, a jail near Seattle, asked prisoners serving time for nonviolent drug-or alcohol-related crimes to sit through Vipassana meditation for 10 days, 11 hours a day, alternating sitting and walking meditations. They were chosen for their extreme rehabilitation needs and because, really, who else are you going to get to bear with 11-hour meditation sessions? Approximately 56% of the newly enlightened prisoners returned to jail within two years, compared with a 75% recidivism rate among...
Very early on, the American Buddhist trailblazers, particularly those working in Vipassana and Zen, made a vital break from Asian tradition: they opted against trying to replicate the Asian monastic system, where intense practice is left to the monks and the main devotion of laypeople is once-a-week temple offerings. "American people don't want to be monks and nuns," says Kornfield. "They want practices that transform the heart." The approach seemed to work: Kornfield's meditation seminars with Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg in Barre, Mass., and at Spirit Rock in California, turned out thousands of graduates. Zendos began...
...Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. Thurman states baldly that those like Batchelor who prefer their Buddhism karma free "are non-Buddhists...they want to live as American humanists and call it Buddhism, [but] it's not really solid." He is only slightly less disdainful of Vipassana seminars that de-emphasize the supernatural side of the faith for the mechanics of meditation, or who, as Thurman puts it, "teach laypeople and rationalize their own departures from the traditional view. I did so for 15 years myself." For Thurman, "Euro-American Buddhism doesn't exist...