Raising the Buddha’s Hand

Piotr Szymanek, Matylda Ciołkosz
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Abstract

Deity yoga is a practice found in Tibetan Buddhism involving visualizations that have the normative goal of “becoming one” with a supernatural being. During the practice, practitioners report experiencing that their own body transforms into the body of the deity. This paper offers a potential cognitive explanation of how such an experience is possible. Applying findings from cognitive science on the phenomenon of illusory ownership, we argue that the practice of deity yoga has the necessary means to cause an experience analogous to the famous “rubber hand illusion” in which one misattributes their ownership to a fake hand. In this paper, we 1) introduce deity yoga practice and its key aspects; 2) discuss illusory ownership and its explanation embedded in a predictive processing framework; 3) argue that visualization in deity yoga may induce the experience of illusory ownership; and 4) conclude with a short discussion of the hypothesis’ limitations and of ways to test our hypothesis. Overall, the paper suggests how the practice of visualization in deity yoga may lead to an experience of a transfer of identity onto an imagined supernatural agent.
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举佛之手
神性瑜伽是藏传佛教中发现的一种练习,涉及到与超自然存在“融为一体”的规范目标。在练习过程中,练习者报告说,他们体验到自己的身体变成了神的身体。这篇论文提供了一种潜在的认知解释,说明这种体验是如何可能的。运用认知科学对错觉所有权现象的研究结果,我们认为神性瑜伽的练习有必要的手段来引起类似于著名的“橡胶手错觉”的体验,在这种错觉中,人们错误地将自己的所有权归因于假手。本文首先介绍神性瑜伽的练习及其关键方面;2)讨论了嵌入在预测处理框架中的虚幻所有权及其解释;3)认为神性瑜伽中的观想可能诱发幻相所有权的体验;最后对假设的局限性和检验假设的方法进行简短的讨论。总的来说,这篇论文表明,在神性瑜伽中,形象化的练习可能会导致一种身份转移到想象中的超自然媒介上的体验。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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1.70
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