**[SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies](https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/research-centres/centre-yoga-studies)** is delighted to host Jürgen Hanneder, Professor at Philipps-Universität Marburg and principal investigator of the *Light on Haṭha* project, for a lecture entitled “Early Manuals of Meditation.”
Meditational practices are ubiquitous in Indian religions. In Buddhism meditation ranks among the most important practices, in many other religions within Hinduism it seems to occur in a bewildering multitude of forms.

Quite contrary to this Indologists would be hard pressed to produce many manuals of meditation that go beyond a typical form of name dropping. We do find many texts with stages of meditation, sub-stages and other scholastic differentiations, but these are usually based on or even merely consist of listings of doctrinal terms and their definitions. In frustration about this some Indologists have asked whether such texts were the product of scholastic philosophers with no practical knowledge of meditation.

So why not read the lesser known old texts? In this lecture Prof. Hanneder is intending to introduce two texts (Sanskrit and Tibetan) that for my taste do not fall into this category, but are not widely known. One describes a practice that has become, or perhaps remained, one of the preferred entry level techniques in Zen meditation, the other claims to capture the meditation technique of famous meditator, who is otherwise shrouded in mystery.

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Jürgen Hanneder – Early Manuals of Meditation

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Jürgen Hanneder – Early Manuals of Meditation

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