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1 results

  • 30 - Imagining the Real: Buddhist Paths to Wholeness in Tibet

  • from Part IV - Novel Combinatorial Forms of the Imagination
  • Edited by Anna Abraham, University of Georgia
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination
    Published online:
    26 May 2020
    Print publication:
    18 June 2020, pp 500-513

  • Summary

    Imagination is crucial in the Buddhist contemplative practices of Tibet. And yet the path to freedom in which they participate requires release from all imagining. This conundrum leads us to examine a sequence of practices from two of Tibet’s greatest poet-philosopher–practitioners, Longchen Rabjampa and Jigme Lingpa. In our reading, their instructions identify somatic, cognitive, creative, intentional, distracted, confused, or corrective states of imagination. Intentional imagining is an intentional method for resolving confused or distracted imagining. In detailing this we ask also how imagination differs from or overlaps with thought. We find that training in the intentional can elicit transmodal perception of reminiscence of what we knew as infants, suggesting that the imagination helps take us deep into body-mind memory. Finally, and especially significant for insights into the deep structure of perception, we note Dzogchen’s appreciation of the imagination’s capacity for dissolving itself, into a particularly expansive dimension of human experience.