Fear and Terror in Buddhist Meditation

Abstract

This article explores the extent to which cognitive historiography can be employed to comment on debates concerning the interpretation of meditative experiences in select Buddhist texts. In particular, this article considers references to meditation-related fear and other associated emotional, perceptual, and cognitive changes. Qualitative data from Western Buddhist meditation practitioners and meditation teachers are employed to further illustrate the range of fear-related experiences and how they are interpreted. To account for why certain references to fear in Buddhist literature could plausibly be read as representative of meditation-related experiences, this article develops cognitive models based on neuroscientific research on meditation as well as from cognitive and affective neuroscience more broadly. However, this process reveals some current limitations in the field of neuroscience of meditation as well as other methodological difficulties faced by cognitive historiography when attempting to account for religious experiences from other cultures and from distant times.