Discover the esoteric branch of Theravada meditation in the first English-language exploration of a practice tradition nearly lost to history.
KATE CROSBY is professor of Buddhist Studies at King's College London. Her work focuses on Sanskrit, Pali, and Pali-vernacular literature and on Theravada practice in the pre-modern and modern periods. Her other publications includeTheravada Buddhism- Continuity, Diversity, Identity and The Bodhicaryavatara.
“Esoteric Theravada is a comprehensive presentation of an ancient
meditative system that unsettles some of our commonplace notions
about the Theravada. . . . This attempt to rehabilitate borān
kamatthāna to its place in the Theravada meditational landscape
reminds us of the dangers of becoming too rigid in our ideas about
what constitutes a legitimate method for transforming the
mind.”—Buddhadharma
“Crosby’s careful and robust study will be eye-opening for Western
Buddhist circles.”—Publishers Weekly
“Crosby does an excellent job of outlining the system and
historical context of borān kammaṭṭhāna. . . . [Her]
well-researched, engaging, and expansive monograph breaks further
ground on a set of research questions and materials that will keep
scholars busy for some time. She has taken her reader to the edge
of a new horizon, perhaps truly beyond the reach of anyone alive
today. Crosby thus gifts her readers, both specialists and
practitioners alike, with a glimpse into a new way to conceptualise
the history of Theravada Buddhism, and South and Southeast Asian
intellectual cultures.”—Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies
“Crosby offers something truly new and valuable in this book: a
historically based critique of the modern construction of
Theravada.”—Buddhistdoor Global
“This book is one of the most important works on the history of
Southeast Asian and Southern Buddhist meditation in decades. It
shows how a whole tradition of practice, meditation, and
mindfulness was lost—almost—in the wave of interest in Buddhism for
its “scientific” and rational elements over the last hundred and
fifty years. The borān kamatthāna is the living meditative
tradition of Cambodia and Thailand. Until only a few decades ago,
it was taught throughout these regions. Crosby’s book shows how
this expressive, embodied system of samatha/vipassanā meditation
constitutes the oldest documented lineage of Buddhist practice in
South and Southeast Asia. Belittled by modernist impulses, the
system offers a complete path of spiritual development that works
on principles found in South and Southeast Asian generative
grammar, medicine, yantra, and the Abhidhamma. This account of how
borān kamatthāna originated as an enactment of Asian generative
systems is brilliant, concise, and revelatory. Borān kamatthāna is
scientific, but in ways steeped in highly sophisticated ancient
models of grammar and medicine colonialists did not understand.
Reformist agendas, still active today, undermined its rich
meditative line and Crosby’s work is essential reading for anyone
interested in a true picture of traditional Buddhist practice in
these regions. Esoteric Theravada rewrites the recent history of
Southern Buddhist meditation.”—Sarah Shaw, author of Mindfulness:
Where It Comes From and What It Means
“Professor Crosby’s book sheds new light on a vitally important yet
neglected—at times even suppressed—system of meditative practice in
South and Southeast Asia. Her work reveals forms of meditation,
once widely practiced though now nearly extinct, that diverge
sharply from the techniques and even the mindset of the insight
practices (vipassanā) dominant today. Deeply researched and lucidly
written, Esoteric Theravada is necessary reading for anyone
interested in Theravada Buddhist philosophy (Abhidhamma), the
interfaces of scientific learning and practices of
self-cultivation, and the history of Buddhist meditation.”—Erik
Braun, author of The Birth of Insight and coeditor of Meditation,
Buddhism, and Science
“Dr. Crosby’s new book on traditional Theravada meditation signals
a new direction in the history of South and Southeast Asian
Buddhism. She has uncovered, through an intense interrogation of
rare materials, an entire lineage of meditation teachers, methods,
and existential ratiocinations that have been neglected by
scholars. She effectively cauterizes a wound in the field and will
lead a new generation of scholars to a fuller and more nuanced
understanding of the relation between the body and the mind in
regional Buddhist practice.”—Justin Thomas McDaniel, Professor of
Buddhist studies, University of Pennsylvania
“Crosby’s acribic detective work has uncovered the principles of a
hitherto almost forgotten meditation tradition that was called ‘the
old practices’ (borān kamatthāna). The principles of borān
kamatthāna are hidden in texts abounding with metaphors and
substitutions. Crosby unravels and explains these texts by entering
thought modes of preindustrial times, mapping correspondences
between parts of the body and mystical ideas, and using letter,
sound, and number symbolism. By showing us ‘the old practices,’
Crosby lays to rest the myth of a pure authentic original Theravada
tradition, a myth that too long obscured the diversity of the
past.”—Barend Jan Terwiel, Emeritus Professor of Thai and Lao
Languages and Literatures, Hamburg University
“Kate Crosby’s Esoteric Theravada is a fascinating and wide-ranging
treatment of traditional borān kammatthāna style meditation in
Theravada Buddhism. Readable and accessible to anyone interested in
meditation and an absolute goldmine for historians of Buddhism,
this remarkable study of a meditation tradition, its texts,
technologies, and the history of its decline gives us insight into
the profound thought worlds of Buddhists who were on the ‘losing’
side of the modernist reforms of Buddhism in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Crosby’s rare combination of painstaking
historical research, linguistic prowess, and engrossing
ethnographic interviews in combination with her own experience as a
practitioner of borān meditation deftly opens up an important
strand of the Theravada tradition that has too often been lost from
view.”—Anne Hansen, Professor of Southeast Asian History &
Religious Studies, University of Wisconsin–Madison
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