Contemplative Epistemologies: Diverse Methods and Practices

This paper explores the epistemology of contemplative practice through three texts representative of distinct contemplative traditions: the Paramārthasāra of Abhinavagupta (Trika), Sāṃkhyakārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa (Sāṃkhya) and the Pañcadaśī of Mādhava-Vidyāraṇya (Advaita Vedānta). It approaches them to unravel a common underlying methodological framework of the managing or governance of attention (avadhāna) and awareness as the primary mode of self-knowledge. Engaging new materialist scholarship, it further develops the tight mutual relationship obtaining between the material body and its immaterial other articulated differently in each case, but resting on a common structure of movement from the palpable/corporeal to the impalpable/incorporeal.

Leading researchers have criticized the pace at which mindfulness meditation has become adopted as a clinical intervention, warning that its benefits have not been adequately established and potential harms not ruled out (e.g., Van Dam et al. 2018). Their abundance of caution stems from an undue reliance on the evidence-based medicine (EBM) hierarchy of evidence, according to which randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and meta-analyses are superior to other evidence. I argue that, plausibly, meditation is effective not because of a single “active ingredient,” but also due to its embeddedness in a rich context. Yet RCT methodology precludes discovering that this is the case and meta-analyses typically exclude non-RCT evidence. I instead propose the inductive reward principle for weighing evidence: However we conceive of evidence quality, we should relax our standard if the prima facie risk of harm is low and the potential to benefit many people is high. 

The recitation of the Qurʾān in Arabic and the chanting of Arabic Sufi poetry are regular contemplative practices throughout the Muslim world that are a means of arriving at a higher state of awareness or consciousness of reality.  Thus they are an epistemological route that help the reciter acquire a higher form of knowing and knowledge.  In this paper I share how the both the Qurʾān and Sufi poetry (written by well-known Sufis such as Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1240) but also by lesser known Sufis such as ʿĀʾisha al-Bāʿūnīyya (d. 1517)) have been used as a means of acquiring a higher form of knowledge and entering into higher states of consciousness and being.

Using the framework of 4E cognition, this study focuses on how processes of learning to meditate are both embedded and enactive. Drawing on ethnographic data from participant observation and structured, in-depth interviews with hospital chaplains (n=20) in a Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) program, this study describes how participants' prior knowledge of devotional practices constituted important social and cultural context for learning. Likewise, this study documents how learners enactively adapted the postures, durations, and mental exercises of the CBCT protocol when incorporating it into their regular habits of practice. In learning this standardized contemplative intervention, chaplains were not passive recipients but instead actively and creatively tailored and even hybridized CBCT to meet their needs and pursue their goals. The embedded and enactive aspects of contemplative learning reveal valuable resources that shape how contemplative practices are adopted and adapted into practitioners’ lives.