Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience

Robert Sharf's 1995 article in Numen, a leading peer-reviewed journal for the academic study of religion, is a standard critical source examining how the rhetoric of pure, unmediated meditative experience functions within modern Buddhist modernism, arguing that the claim of direct experience is itself a rhetorical and historically situated construction rather than a transparent report of what meditation reveals. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed article by a recognized scholar of Buddhism in a major journal in the field. Its limit is that it is a single article making one argument about one strand of modern Buddhist discourse, not a comprehensive survey of meditation practice across traditions, so a claim about a specific tradition's own understanding of meditative experience needs a source addressing that tradition directly.