Description: Knowing Body, Moving Mind explores ritualizing and learning in meditation classes at two Buddhist centers in Toronto. Based on interviews with students and teachers, it explores the ways formal Buddhist practices generate learning; discovering that body and mind together gain new skills and understanding by way of embodied, gestural rites.
Review Quotes: "Knowing Body, Moving Mind makes a significant contribution to the fields of religious studies and Buddhist studies, as well as philosophical questions concerning the learning process and the mind/body relation. There is a dearth of studies on meditation in the West that have much ethnographic grounding. I know personally from speaking to many Buddhist studies teachers that they are at a loss as to what to assign students when confronting these issues. There are, as the author points out, many surveys and histories of East-West transmissions, but very little ethnographically. This book is a landmark in this respect."
--Alan Klima, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California at Davis