Search Results (233)

The Xingqi (行气, breath circulation) pattern bronze mirrors of the Song Dynasty (960–1279 CE) represent a distinctive category of Daoist material culture in southern China. Despite their unique iconography, systematic research on their functions and religious significance has been lacking. This study examines sixteen Xingqi pattern bronze mirrors through iconographic analysis and textual research, integrating evidence from surviving Daoist scriptures and ritual manuals. Two primary types are identified: the “Tortoise-Swallowing and Crane-Breathing Style” and the “Sun and Moon Observing Style”. The former depicts practitioners imitating the breathing techniques of tortoises and cranes, while the latter shows figures gazing upward to ingest the essences of the sun and moon. Both motifs continue earlier health preservation traditions from the Pre-Qin (221–207 BCE) through Han dynasties, adapted within the Northern and Southern Song context. These mirrors were specifically used by Daoists along the middle Yangtze River for inner alchemy cultivation, particularly in visualized Cunsi (存思, contemplation practices). They were predominantly passed down through generations rather than buried, explaining their scarcity in archaeological contexts. These artifacts illuminate how Song Daoism translated abstract philosophical concepts into tangible, operable practices through material imagery. They provide new physical evidence for understanding historical Daoist cultivation methods and the materialization of religious experience. Full article

This narrative review synthesizes research demonstrating the multi-domain import of nasal breathing across developmental, physiological, immunological, and neuropsychological domains, with the aim of communicating its potential clinical relevance and motivating future empirical investigation. We broadly address developmental and evolutionary foundations and the pathways through which nasal breathing influences health, functioning, and subjective experience. Across these areas, evidence implicates nasal breathing in immune defense, autonomic and emotion regulation, limbic entrainment, and aspects of consciousness. Notably, many contemplative traditions—including yogic pranayama, Sufi, and Buddhist practices—have long emphasized nasal breathing for its physical and spiritual benefits, and contemporary evidence increasingly buttresses components of these traditional beliefs, with growing convergence between contemporary scientific findings and longstanding traditional observation. More broadly, the epistemic basis of the evidence supporting nasal breathing’s effects reviewed here ranges considerably, from well-controlled experimental and mechanistic work to preliminary and small-sample studies whose clinical translation remains tenuous, and specific therapeutic inferences should be made cautiously. Nonetheless, nasal breathing represents an underappreciated, low-cost, and accessible adjunctive approach with genuine clinical potential. Realizing that potential will require controlled trials attending to parameter specificity—e.g., respiratory phase, laterality, and rate—and designs that isolate nasal breathing from other aspects of contemplative practices across well-defined populations and outcomes. Full article

Meditation-related difficulties have been systematically documented in contemporary contemplative science, yet the prescriptive resources preserved in the ancient Buddhist commentarial literature remain underutilized in comparative research. This study analyzes the case of five hundred monks in the Paramatthajotikā I’s commentary on the Karaṇīya-metta-sutta. During intensive practice, these monks experienced complex psychosomatic symptoms—perceptual disturbances, fear, somatic distress, and cognitive impairment—and received from the Buddha an integrated prescription of five protective practices (pañca rakkhā). Through Pāli textual and comparative analysis with Lindahl et al.’s taxonomy of meditation-related difficulties, this study demonstrates that the monks’ symptoms correspond systematically to the perceptual, affective, somatic, and cognitive domains of the modern taxonomy, with the critical difference residing in interpretive frameworks rather than in the phenomena themselves. The five practices—loving-kindness meditation, protective chant recitation, contemplation of impurity, mindfulness of death, and the arousal of religious urgency—constitute a sequentially structured system progressing from the emotional reframing of fear to the deconstruction of bodily and existential attachment, culminating in the restoration of soteriological motivation. This study argues that Paramatthajotikā I’s prescriptive system provides a historically grounded, soteriologically oriented complement to contemporary contemplative science, particularly in bridging the gap between phenomenological classification and meaning-centered intervention. Full article

Background/Objectives: Lucid dreaming—dreaming with the awareness that one is dreaming—has been explored from many perspectives, including those of cognitive neuroscience and various ancient cultural traditions. Lucid dreaming appears within the Tibetan-Buddhist literature together with dream yoga, a set of contemplative practices aimed at cultivating lucidity during dreams along with other qualities such as visual imagination, somatic awareness, and cognitive flexibility. These practices include deity visualization, which is the practice of bringing to mind a detailed image of a being whose qualities the practitioner wishes to cultivate. We examined whether it is possible to induce a lucid dream of Chenrezig, the ultimate embodiment of compassion in a Tibetan-Buddhist context. Methods: Five participants slept in the sleep laboratory for 7 overnight sessions with polysomnographic recording and auditory reminders to visualize Chenrezig during REM sleep. Results: Lucid dreams were reported by two participants. A frequent lucid dreamer with no prior Tibetan-Buddhist training experienced a lucid dream that included a visualization of Chenrezig following auditory cueing during REM sleep. A monastic participant with no prior history of lucid dreaming reported their first-ever lucid dream on the night following their laboratory session. Conclusions: This exploratory study illustrates, via collaborative research including monastic scholars trained in neuroscience, that dream content can be intentionally shaped using an approach that integrates contemplative visualization practices with modern techniques of dream engineering. Full article

Since the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the question of whether ordinary beings (fanfu 凡夫) could attain rebirth in Amitābha’s Pure Land became a central concern in Chinese Buddhism. In the Chen and Sui periods, exegetes of the She lun 攝論 and some Di lun 地論 masters generally denied this possibility. By the seventh century, however, Master Huai’gan 懷感, building on the teachings of Shandao 善導, systematically addressed these doubts in his Treatise on Resolving Doubts about the Pure Land (Shi jingtu qunyi lun 釋淨土群疑論). He refuted the Yogācāra (Weishi zong 唯識宗) claim that only bodhisattvas can be reborn there, insisting that all beings, though differing in spiritual capacities, are able to attain rebirth in Pure Land. Against the Three Stages teaching (Sanjie jiao 三階教), which regarded beings of the degenerate age as wholly evil and unfit for Pure Land practice. Huai’gan stressed the role of bodhicitta and argued that Buddha recitation eradicates karmic obstacles, enabling even perpetrators of the Ten Evils or slanderers of the Dharma to be reborn. Reconciling discrepancies between the Sūtra of Infinite Life and the Contemplation Sūtra on the issue of the five grave offenses, he highlighted the criterion of ten invocations as sufficient for rebirth. Huai’gan effectively universalized the Pure Land path by reconciling the Yogācāra-based theory of the Transformtion Land with the orthodox Pure Land view of the Reward Land (baotu 報土) as a literal reality generated by Amitābha Buddha’s Vow-power. In doing so, Huai’gan shifted pre-Tang restrictive views toward a more inclusive Pure Land vision, paving the way for the open orientation of early Tang Pure Land thought. Full article

This study investigates how South Korean meditation teachers conceptualize core professional competencies in digitally delivered and AI-mediated contemplative contexts, addressing a gap in prior research that has emphasized effectiveness and technological scalability over teachers’ own understandings of authority and professionalism. Using Q methodology, the study identified shared subjective meaning structures among 21 certified meditation teachers in South Korea. From 133 competency-related statements derived from academic literature and practitioner sources, a 33-item Q sample was developed and analyzed through by-person factor analysis. The analysis revealed four distinct perception types of meditation teaching competencies: 1. Embodied Practice-Grounded, prioritizing the depth of personal meditative practice; 2. Relational Presence-Grounded, emphasizing intersubjective attunement between teacher and practitioner; 3. Pedagogical Judgment-Grounded, focusing on the strategic integration of theory and coaching practice; and 4. Ethical Self-Reflection-Grounded, centering on ongoing moral reflexivity and inner examination. The findings indicate that, in the face of AI-driven automation, meditation teaching competence is perceived not as a set of technical skills or digital literacy, but as a “way of being” rooted in the triadic integration of ethical self-awareness, relational presence, and embodied practice. Furthermore, the study suggests that in AI-mediated contemplative environments, professional competence in AI-mediated contemplative environments is defined less by technological adoption than by ethical discernment and responsibility for non-delegable aspects of guidance, advancing a practitioner-centered account of spiritual authority in the era of artificial intelligence. Full article

This article offers the first systematic analytical methodology to understand distant play as a multidimensional, ludoliterary, critical, and philosophical practice of engaging with so-called idle or semi-idle games. It uses Anselm Pyta’s The Longing, a so far underexplored semi-idle, slow game that challenges traditional gameplay paradigms through its metareferential, bookish, philosophical, and contemplative structure, as a case study. Our central argument is that The Longing deploys antimimetic temporal mechanics, interpassive forms of bookish play, and ideas of existentialist resistance to explore themes of time, agency, and existential longing, thereby offering a reflective space for dealing with neo-liberal, post-pandemic, polycrisis-stricken angst. To come to terms with the multidisciplinary complexities of the game, our paper adopts a triadic analytical methodology interweaving insights from postclassical, medium-specific narratology, platform-comparative literary analysis, and existentialist philosophy. This combined approach transcends existing ludoliterary frameworks and accounts for divergent forms of play. Our first focus is the game’s multiscalar temporal layering and the strategies it requires from players to “ludify” antimimetic frictions between those layers. This is followed by an examination of how the game constructs a bookish player by interweaving ludexical processes of reading, unreading, dis-reading, and writing (in) books and other printed documents. Finally, we turn to the game’s complex interpassive relationships between player, player-character, and game world, highlighting in particular the role of walking, collecting, building, and searching as acts of catharsis and rebellion, and examining failure as a valid ludic alternative to survival and happiness. Ultimately, our analysis renders distant play as a form of parasocial resistance, which in The Longing manifests as an affective and philosophically fine-grained combination of more-than-human relationality, care, and relief vis-a-vis the nothingness of lost hope. The game thus offers a new form of e-literary engagement, placing books and their “unnatural,” transmediated affordances front and center while questioning the capitalist undercurrents of contemporary literary media and critiquing a culture of acceleration. Full article

The desire to discover the nature of existence and one’s proper role in the universe has been a matter of concern throughout the ages, and individuals have endeavoured to examine the events that occur around them accordingly. In their pursuit, some have embarked on a deeper search for meaning, independent of common perceptions, and have posited that forms of expression beyond the limits of language could potentially provide important clues about the course of their lives. Transcending the limits of language can essentially be achieved by choosing a form of expression that goes beyond sounds, letters, words, or speech. Explained by certain scholars as beyond words, silence (Ar. al-ṣamt) is a discourse or mode of expression that involves the ability to speak inwardly (Ar. al-nuṭq). Thus, silence encompasses the ability to speak through remaining silent—a mode that, at first glance, appears to be paradoxical. This study focuses on one of the ways of attaining truth in theoretical and practical Ṣūfīsm: by remaining silent and finding the key to inner silence simultaneously. To reach such a level of understanding, it is crucial to examine how Ṣūfīs attempt to assimilate the inherent meaning beyond the boundaries of ordinary speech and approach the concept of silence from various aspects. By way of examining the possibility of communicating through silence according to some Ṣūfīs, the ways to a life in contemplation may be analysed to the extent that one could find a language that goes beyond letters or words. Full article

This paper reconfigures the theme of divine encounters in the literature by examining the intersection of pantheism, vitalism, and ecological imagination, with a particular focus on Percy Bysshe Shelley. Far from depicting the divine as transcendent, Shelley envisions it as an immanent force permeating nature, matter, and life itself. In poems such as “Queen Mab”, “Mont Blanc”, “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”, “Ode to the West Wind”, or “The Cloud” Shelley translates vitalist science into poetic vision, challenging orthodox religious beliefs and contemplating the divine as inherent in natural processes. The study also situates Shelley’s thought within a broader genealogy that extends through John Ruskin’s vitalist aesthetics, Henri Bergson’s élan vital, and into contemporary posthumanist philosophy, neomaterialism and ecocriticism, along with scholars who have contributed to reviving and transforming vitalist traditions, reframing human-nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. The paper shows the importance of the Romantic period in the development of vitalist approaches in various fields of knowledge, anticipating ecological concerns. The study is framed as a genealogical and epistemological problem attempting to articulate connections while situating poetic practice as a privileged site where vitalism is negotiated. Full article

This article examines Khotan’s role in the transmission and reception of Avataṃsaka/Huayan Buddhism, arguing that the Buddhāvataṃsaka-sūtra’s exceptional prestige and royal protection in Khotan provided favourable conditions for the circulation—and possibly the redaction—of large Mahāyāna compilations. It then analyses two Avataṃsaka-group meditation texts translated by the Khotanese monk Devendraprajñā (The Section on the Cultivation of Loving-Kindness and The Section on the Inconceivable Buddha-Realm), showing how they combine Huayan cosmology and non-obstruction with visualization-based contemplative techniques. Finally, by reading these texts alongside The Mahāyāna Sūtra on the Merits of Creating Images Spoken by the Buddha, the article highlights a functional differentiation within Khotanese practice: the meditation texts prioritise cognitive and visionary transformation and largely omit formal repentance, whereas the image-making sūtra explicitly requires repentance as a precondition for karmic purification, promising the elimination or mitigation of karmic consequences through the making of Buddha images. Full article

This article examines the cognitive theory expressed in early Buddhist Pāli sources by situating their analyses of perception, language, and meditative experience within a psychosemiotic framework. It argues that Buddhist thinkers conceived cognition as a stratified process emerging from the dynamic interaction between sensory and effectual domains, culminating in the semiotic determinations of nāmarūpa and the proliferative activity of conceptual constructs. Drawing on parallels with Peircean pansemioticism, the study highlights how both traditions interpret phenomena as sign-constituted events and how contemplative practice can intervene in the habitual chains of semiosis that ordinarily shape human experience. By bridging Buddhist phenomenology with contemporary cognitive science and semiotics, this work proposes that the Buddhist model—precise in its technical vocabulary and rich in its analyses of attention, perception, and conceptualization—offers valuable tools for understanding and modulating cognitive processes in both theoretical and practical domains. Full article

Background/Objectives: The present exploratory study evaluates the feasibility and psychological effects of a structured Qigong intervention implemented in an Italian university setting. Qigong is a traditional Chinese mind–body practice combining gentle movements, breathwork, and mindful attention, aimed at enhancing mind–body integration and interoceptive awareness. Methods: A total of 332 undergraduate students voluntarily enrolled in a 12-week Qigong program. The intervention was based on Neidan Qigong and integrated both static and dynamic exercises. Psychological functioning was assessed through several self-report measures evaluating a range of constructs, including mindfulness (FFMQ), interoceptive ability (MAIA), perceived stress (PSS), depression, anxiety, and stress (BDI; DASS-21; STAI Y), emotion regulation (DERS), alexithymia (TAS), and sleep quality (PSQI). Results: A total of 114 students completed the intervention. The protocol was well received by participants and demonstrated high feasibility in the academic context, with good attendance rates and overall engagement. Preliminary findings indicate consistent improvements across several psychological domains. Conclusions: The results suggest that Qigong may be associated with improvements in mental health and well-being in young adults and may represent a promising, low-cost intervention. The findings should be interpreted as preliminary. Further research using controlled and methodologically rigorous designs is needed to assess the stability of these effects over time, incorporate physiological measures, and clarify the specific therapeutic contribution of spontaneous movement within Qigong practice. Full article

Growing interest in food sustainability education aims to increase awareness of food distribution systems, environmental degradation, and the connectivity of sustainable and ethical food practices. However, recent scholarship has questioned whether such pedagogical efforts are meaningfully internalized by students or lead to sustained behavioral change. Prior studies document persistent gaps in students’ understanding of sustainability impacts and the limited effectiveness of existing instructional approaches in promoting transformative engagement. To address these concerns, the Food Ethics, Sustainability and Alternatives (FESA) course was implemented with 21 undergraduate and graduate students at Montclair State University (Montclair, NJ, USA). Course outcomes were evaluated using a mixed-methods design integrating qualitative analysis with quantitative measures informed by the Theory of Planned Behavior, to identify influences on students’ attitudes, and a Transtheoretical Model (TTM) panel survey to address progression from awareness to action, administered pre- and post-semester. Qualitative findings revealed five central themes: increased self-awareness of food system contexts, heightened attention to animal ethics, the importance of structured classroom dialogue, greater recognition of food waste, and increased openness to alternative food sources. TTM results indicated significant reductions in contemplation and preparation stages, suggesting greater readiness for change, though no significant gains were observed in action or maintenance scores. Overall, the findings suggest that while food sustainability education can positively shape student attitudes, the conversion of attitudinal shifts into sustained behavioral change remains limited by external constraints, including time pressures, economic factors, culturally embedded dietary practices, structural tensions within contemporary food systems, and perceptions of limited individual efficacy. Full article

In Indian religious traditions, the attainment of death with full conscious awareness has long been idealized, reflecting the deep ontological connection posited between death and liberation (mokṣa). Within this framework, Jainism—grounded in a rigorous soul–matter dualism—developed highly systematized practices that aim to separate consciousness from both the body and karma not only at the moment of death but throughout daily practice, as exemplified by kāyotsarga. Although sallekhaṇā (fasting unto death) has received considerable attention beyond Jain communities in the context of “death with dignity,” its deeper meditative dimensions have remained largely understudied. This article elucidates the meditative techniques of samādhimaraṇa underlying sallekhaṇā by examining classical Jain sources on deathbed meditation, particularly the kevalin’s procedures at the third and fourth stages of pure meditation (śukladhyāna). The analysis also addresses kevali-samudghāta—the uniquely Jain technique of “omniscient soul projection” incorporated into the third stage of śukladhyāna in Hemacandra’s twelfth-century Yogaśāstra—thereby clarifying the broader meditative context of sallekhaṇā. By situating samādhimaraṇa within its doctrinal, meditative, and soteriological contexts—rather than reducing it to suicide or to a religious variant of “death with dignity”—this article contributes to a more precise and contextualized understanding of Jain deathbed meditation. In doing so, it also contributes to the expanding field of death-yoga studies that has so far focused primarily on Hindu and Buddhist traditions, highlighting the distinctive role of Jainism in the landscape of Indian contemplative practice. Full article

Amidst deepening ecological disruption and widespread disconnection from nature, this study explores the emerging field of Earth Awareness (EA) as a relational and experiential aspect of advancing planetary health. EA practices—rooted in Buddhist, Indigenous, mindfulness, and nature-based traditions—support direct experiences of interconnectedness with Earth, ecological awareness and consciousness, and opportunities to transform underlying patterns and systems. Through 45 reflective dialogues with teachers and practitioners across traditions, this participatory research identifies common inspirations, intentions, and challenges that shape the emerging EA field. Findings reveal that EA is characterized by contemplative practices, rituals, and ceremonies that bridge inner transformation and outer action in the world. Central intentions such as healing, interconnectedness, and justice align closely with planetary health priorities, including mental well-being, equity, and stewardship of the living world. Although the field faces challenges related to access, risk of cultural appropriation, and systemic separation, participants identified opportunities for community building, intercultural exchange, and centering Earth as teacher and co-participant. By mapping coherence in this diverse field, this study highlights EA’s potential to contribute to planetary health by reconnecting people with place, fostering a more ecological consciousness, and supporting culturally grounded pathways for collective action and care for Earth. Full article