The recent advent of Theravada Buddhist meditation to the West raises questions for psychological ethnography: How can the psychological symbols and beliefs which are indigenous to a remote place and time come to have meaning for individuals raised in a culturally dissimilar setting, and what happens to a system of psychology in its adjustment to its new cultural milieu? Buddhism is chosen because its concept of self, anatta, radically negates the existence of the self which is most familiar to Western folk psychology. Intensive meditation causes profound alterations in the experience of self, allowing an examination of this concept through lived experience. This examination was done through an idiographic psychological field study of 9 advanced American yogis engaged in long term intensive vipassana meditation. Data gathering consisted mainly of intensive open-ended interviews intended to elucidate self-representation and qualities of the experience of self, which were considered in multiple contexts, including the contexts of Buddhist ideology and practice in Asia and the United States, life history, life-course development in historical time, and individual personality. It was argued that if the claims of the yogis and Buddhist literature are taken seriously, the experience of anatta cannot be adequately understood through contextual analysis alone; by providing a psychology which rejects all forms of centric viewpoints, Buddhism argues that some conscious experience is "preconceptual," and therefore "precultural," though it is carried and represented in cultural forms. Buddhism in the American cultural setting is discussed, with special attention to particular cultural features which Buddhism faces in the United States.
目次
Introduction 1 Part II: Buddhism in Theory and Practice 9 Part III: Biographies 88 Part IV: The Multiple Contexts of American Buddhist Practice 177 Part V: Buddhism in the United States 247 Appendix 276 Footnotes 277 Bibliography 291
