Conceptual Metaphors and Soteriology in early Hindu and Buddhist Meditation Text
GB 5/150–152 „Ruhrpott“
Guest lecture by Karen O'Brien-Kop (King’s College London)
This paper examines paths to liberation in early Hindu and Buddhist Sanskrit meditation treatises, such as the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya and Pātañjalayogaśāstra, through the lens of conceptual metaphor theory (e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Fauconnier and Turner 2003; Gibbs 2017; Kövecses 2020; Rodríguez 2025). It argues that soteriological goals such as mokṣa or nirvāṇa are complex systems of conceptual metaphors that are derived from bodily experiences of the material world. We will analyse primary metaphors of mind and meditation in early Indic soteriology and then critically inspect them to show how such metaphors were constructed within real-world agrarian and urban economies in the early first millennium. The paper explores how these and other basic conceptual metaphors arise from sensory experience in physical environments and from preconceptual structures (e.g. up/down) derived from visceral human practices and embodiment. Drawing on the framework of conceptual metaphor theory, the paper employs tools such as image-schema (pre-linguistic or pre-verbal), domain-mapping, root metaphors, metaphor networks and blended metaphors to understand simple and complex variations such as ‘seeds of karma’, ‘clouds of dharma’, or ‘ladders of liberation’, giving us access to the deep semantic field of these common images. Using metaphor theory to analyse meditation texts enriches understanding of both text and embodied world-making. On the one hand, we see that meditation was materially determined, and textual metaphors tell us about the material world in which they were produced. On the other hand, it is only through conceptual metaphors that the abstractions of soteriology can sustain meaning. The resulting structural and functional analysis is to ‘denaturalise’ certain assumptions about meditation, including ‘mystical’ foundations.
