Abstract
In the context of contemporary interest in the use of Buddhist meditation practices in modern psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy, this article offers a preliminary survey of a subject hitherto almost completely unstudied: madness in Premodern P?li texts. (Possession, especially but not only by M?ra, who is both a deity and a phenomenological reality, is regarded by the P?li tradition as a kind of madness.) Using story-literature as well as doctrinal and jurisprudential texts, the article aims to collect together material on three ways in which the ideas and behaviours of madness are used: (i) the literal-pathological, (ii) in comparisons (‘as if’ mad), and (iii) in the metaphorical-evaluative sense where it is alleged that everyone who is not enlightened (or at least on the Path to it) is ‘mad’. It is centered around an eightfold classification of madness given in the commentary to a J?taka story, the Birth Story about Dar?mukha (Ja III #378, III 238–246).
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