Top Research Papers on Vipassana Meditation

The present preliminary findings suggest that the practice of Vipassana meditation may help mitigate psychological and psychosomatic distress in a multi-ethnic population in the city of Muscat.

Vipassana meditation, an ancient meditation technique originating from India, translates to "to see things as they are" and aims for the complete eradication of mental impurities.

The practice of vipassana meditation emphasizes the role of meditative experience in coming to understand the Buddhist worldview and in effecting personal transformation. Data obtained from fieldwork conducted between 2003 and 2005 at the Blue Mountains Insight Meditation Centre (BMIMC) in Medlow Bath, NSW Australia, illustrate the process by which aspects of doctrine come to be accepted through an experiential understanding of their import. Many respondents attributed significance to their experiential understanding of dukkha, suffering, and anicca, impermanence, gained through Vipassana prac...

VM appears to promote mindfulness, mainly because of the effect of non-judgmental acceptance, in patients undergoing therapeutic work for enhancing mindfulness and, thereby, mental health.

This paper examines how the teaching of embodied practices of transnational Buddhist meditation has been designated for healing depression explicitly in contemporary Chinese Buddhist communities with the influences of Buddhist modernism in Southeast Asia and globalization. Despite the revival of traditional Chan school meditation practices since the Open Policy, various transnational lay meditation practices, such as vipassanā and mindfulness, have been popularized in monastic and lay communities as a trendy way to heal physical and mental suffering in mainland China. Drawing from a recent eth...

This paper examines how the teaching of embodied practices of transnational Buddhist meditation has been designated for healing depression explicitly in contemporary Chinese Buddhist communities with the influences of Buddhist modernism in Southeast Asia and globalization. Despite the revival of traditional Chan school meditation practices since the Open Policy, various transnational lay meditation practices, such as vipassanā and mindfulness, have been popularized in monastic and lay communities as a trendy way to heal physical and mental suffering in mainland China. Drawing from a recent eth...

Current studies provided preliminary results about neurobiological and clinical changes related to VM practice, but further research is needed to answer critical questions about replications, self-selection, placebo, and long-term effects of VM.

This chapter explores the disaffiliation narratives of former members of one of the most successful international Buddhist organisations – S.N. Goenka’s (1924–2013) Vipassana meditation movement. To date, Goenka’s network is the largest donor-funded Vipassana organisation with over 170 official, and over 130 non-official centers worldwide. These centers offer courses of varying durations (3–60 day), thought the standard ten-day retreats mark one’s entry into this organisation, and hence they are the most frequently held and best attended (Dhamma 2017). Around the globe, Goenka’s courses are co...

Vipassana meditation practice helps to establish a proper cardio autonomic dynamicity during sleep with a persistent increase in parasympathetic activity across sleep states essential for quality sleep and cardio protection.

It will be argued that MBSR bears elements of salvetive and salvific meditation, and its presence in biomedical institutions seems to provide a counter-example in the paradigm of a functional differentiation between ‘religion’ and ‘biomedicine’.

The research emphasized the relevance of vipassana in today's modern world for better mental health and compared the level of self-esteem and self-efficacy of adults who practice vipASSana and also those who do not practice vIPassana.

This paper will explore relevance and roles of Abhidhamma, Theravāda philosophy, in meditation practices with reference to some modern Burmese meditation traditions. In particular, I shall focus on the highly mathematical Paṭṭhāna, Pahtan in Burmese, the seventh text of the Abhidhamma Piṭaka, which deals with the functioning of causality and is regarded by Burmese as the most important of the Abhidhamma traditions. I shall explore how and to what extent the teachings in the Paṭṭhāna are applied in insight (vipassanā) meditation practices, assessing the roles of theoretical knowledge of ultimat...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between mindful attention awareness and emotion regulation as well as the effect of vipassana meditation on these two constructs. The Mindfulness Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS-15) and Difficulties in Emotion Regulation (DERS-36) are used for data collection. Out of 248 participants, 123 are Vipassana Meditators, who practised Vipassana Meditation at least five times per week for the previous two years and had attended at least one 10- day Vipassana Meditation Course from any Vipassana Centre, and 125 are nonmeditators, who d...

Despite the scarcity of references to meditation retreats in the large volume of research and literature concerning the relationship between modern leisure tourism and forms of religiously motivated travel, the number of meditation retreat centres has increased worldwide in recent decades. Michael Stausberg notes the growth in the international spiritual retreat business since the 1980s, and lists the visitation of retreats as one of the common purposes of religious tourism, itself one of the various forms of contemporary spiritual life that are a result of the increased leisure time available...

The theory in the Vipassana Noble Eightfold meditation technique of Buddha is believed to be the Theory of Everything. However, Chinese believed that the Taichi Yin-Yang theory is the Theory of the Universe. Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman believed in the unity of all the equations and theories of physics to explain the nature. Could they be the different truth of the universe? Or they are all the truth of the universe but only illustrated in different terminologies? It is believed that the latter one is the case. The links between these theories are illustrated in this paper using modern ...

This paper shows that Vipassana meditation provides a variety of physical and mental benefits that greatly improve human well-being that include decreased stress, improved immune system function, decreased blood pressure and heart rate, increased sleep quality, and decreased chronic pain.

American culture is suffused and infatuated with anger. Politicians strive to placate the “Angry White Male,” whose antagonisms also find expression in road rage, overheated talk radio, violent video games, and players-fans skirmishes at professional sporting events. American media churns out alarmingly vivid images of violence, and the ominous tendency for teenagers, in particular, to act out these lurid fantasies of “righteous wrath” dramatizes the nexus between this potentially toxic “consumption of cultural items” and anger. Vietnamese expatriate monk Thich Nhat Hanh observes that American...

This article traces interface among four renowned Burmese masters of the Insight Meditation Movement, its political-historical context, and their distinct theoretical understandings and practical ways of dealing with two interrelated aspects of meditation: samatha (concentration) and vipassanā (wisdom). Two main approaches are found: samatha as a preparation for vipassanā, and vipassanā without samatha as a prerequisite. Whereas Goenka and Mogok promulgate a short practice of samatha, Pa Auk focuses on achieving the four jhanās (deep samatha absorption) before vipassanā can be practiced. By co...

With the present paper I investigate how key aspects of insight delineated in the early discourses have been approached in modern day Theravāda meditation practice. In order to illustrate one of the ways in which such practice has been undertaken, I take as an example what at present appears to be the most widely practiced Theravāda vipassanā method. This is the vipassanā tradition of the Burmese lay meditation teacher U Ba Khin (1899–1971), in the form as it is taught by his Indian disciple S.N. Goenka (1924). My study proceeds through the following topics:

Mindfulness change scores between pre-course and 6-month follow-up were moderately to highly correlated with outcome variable change scores, consistent with the idea that effects of the Vipassana course on stress and well-being operate, at least partially, through increasing mindfulness.