Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 26:2/3 (2019) ► pp.197–214

The Wheel of Time

The relationship between religious experiences and Chinese Buddhists’ spatial representations of time

| Southwest University , China
| Zhongnan University of Economics and Law , China

Previous research suggests that both patterns in orthography and cultural-specific associations of space-time affect how people map space onto time. In the current study, we focused on Chinese Buddhists, an understudied population, investigating how religious experiences influence their mental representations of time. Results showed that Chinese Buddhists could represent time spatially corresponding to left-to-right, right-to-left and top-to-bottom orientations in their religious scripts. Specifically, they associated earlier events with the starting point of the reading and later times with the endpoint. We also found that Chinese Buddhists were more likely to represent time in a clockwise way than Chinese atheists. This is because Buddhism regards time as cyclic and consisting of repeating ages (i.e. Wheel of Time). Taken together, we provide first psychological evidence that Chinese Buddhists’ spatial representations of time are different from atheists’, due to their religious experiences, namely, both the reading direction in Buddhist texts and Buddhist concepts of time.

Keywords: space–time mapping, orthography, Buddhist, cyclic representation of time, religious experiences
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Participants
    • 2.2Materials
    • 2.3Procedure
    • 2.4Results and discussion
  • 3.General discussion
  • 4.Conclusion
  • References
Published online: 12 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.19002.li
References
Anderson, Tenshin
2001 Being upright: Zen meditation and the Bodhisattva precepts. Berkeley, CA: Rodmell.Google Scholar
Ariel, Robert, Ibrahim Al-Harthy, Christopher Was & John Dunlosky
2011 Habitual reading biases in the allocation of study time. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 18(5). 1015–1021. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bergen, Benjamin & Ting Ting Chan Lau
2012 Writing direction affects how people map space onto time. Frontiers in Cultural Psychology 31. 109.Google Scholar
Berzin, Alexander
1997 Taking the Kalachakra initiation. New York: Snow Lion Publications, Incorporated.Google Scholar
Boroditsky, Lera
2000 Metaphoric structuring: Understanding time through spatial metaphors. Cognition 75(1). 1–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2001 Does language shape thought? English and Mandarin speakers’ conceptions of time. Cognitive Psychology 43(1). 1–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Casasanto, Daniel
2009 Embodiment of abstract concepts: Good and bad in right- and left-handers. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 138(3). 351–367. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 The hierarchical structure of mental metaphors. In Beate Hampe (ed.), Metaphor: Embodied cognition and discourse, 46–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Casasanto, Daniel & Robert Bottini
2014 Mirror reading can reverse the flow of time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143(2). 473–479. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Casasanto, Daniel & Kyle Jasmin
2012 The hands of time: Temporal gestures in English speakers. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4). 643–674. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chang, Wonsuk
2009 Reflections on time and related ideas in the Yijing. Philosophy East and West 59(2). 216–229. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Jenn-Yeu
2007 Do Chinese and English speakers think about time differently? Failure of replicating Boroditsky (2001). Cognition 104(2). 427–436. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clark, Herbert
1973 Space, time, semantics, and the child. In Timothy Moore (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of language, 27–63. New York: Academic Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Duffy, Sarah
2014 The role of cultural artifacts in the interpretation of metaphorical expressions about time. Metaphor and Symbol 29(2). 94–112. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eiki, Hoshino & Ian Reader
1997 Pilgrimage and peregrination: Contextualizing the Saikoku Junrei and the Shikoku Henro. Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 24(3–4). 271–299.Google Scholar
Eikmeier, Verena, Simone Alex-Ruf, Claudia Maienborn, & Rolf Ulrich
2015 How strongly linked are mental time and space along the left–right axis? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 41(6), 1878–1883.Google Scholar
Eliot, Thomas Stearns
2010 Notes towards the definition of culture. London, England: Faber & Faber.Google Scholar
Evans, Vyvyan
2013 Language and time: A cognitive linguistics approach. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fuente, Juanma de la, Julio Santiago, Antonio Román, Cristina Dumitrache & Daniel Casasanto
2014 When you think about it, your past is in front of you: How culture shapes spatial conceptions of time. Psychological Science 25(9). 1682–1690. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fuhrman, Orly & Lera Boroditsky
2010 Cross-Cultural differences in mental representations of time: Evidence from an implicit nonlinguistic task. Cognitive Science 34(8). 1430–1451. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gibbs, Raymond
1999 Taking metaphor out of our heads and into the cultural world. In Raymond Gibbs & Gerard Steen (eds.), Metaphor in cognitive linguistics, 145–166. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 Metaphor wars: Conceptual metaphors in human life. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gijssels, Tom & Daniel Casasanto
2017 Conceptualizing time in terms of space: Experimental evidence. In Barbara Dancygier (ed.), Cambridge handbook of cognitive linguistics, 651–668. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gregory, Peter
1986 Traditions of meditation in Chinese Buddhism, vol. 41. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
Hendricks, Rose & Lera Boroditsky
2017 New space–time metaphors foster new nonlinguistic representations. Topics in Cognitive Science 91. 800–818. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hevia, Maria de, Véronique Izard, Aurélie Coubart, Elizabeth Spelke & Arlette Streri
2014 Representations of space, time, and number in neonates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111(13). 4809–4813. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Huck, Schuyler
2004 Reading statistics and research. San Francisco: Allyn & Bacon.Google Scholar
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson
1980 Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Landau, Mark, Brian Meier & Lucas Keefer
2010 A metaphor-enriched social cognition. Psychological Bulletin 136(6). 1045–1067. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Li, Heng, Van Quynh Bui & Yu Cao
2018 One country, two cultures: Implicit space-time mappings in southern and northern Vietnamese. European Journal of Social Psychology 48(3). 560–565. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miles, Lynden, Louise Nind & Neil Macrae
2010 Moving through time. Psychological Science 21(2). 222–223. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ouellet, Marc, Julio Santiago, María Jesús Funes & Juan Lupiáñez
2010 Thinking about the future moves attention to the right. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 36(1). 17–24.Google Scholar
Sobbe, Linda, Edith Scheifele, Claudia Maienborn & Rolf Ulrich
2019 The space–time congruency effect: A meta-analysis. Cognitive Science 43(1). e12709.Google Scholar
Sousa, Hilário de
2012 Generational differences in the orientation of time in Cantonese speakers as a function of changes in the direction of Chinese writing. Frontiers in Psychology 31. 255. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Triandis, Harry
1996 The psychological measurement of cultural syndromes. American Psychologist 51(4). 407–415. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tversky, Barbara, Sol Kugelmass & Atalia Winter
1991 Cross-cultural and developmental trends in graphic productions. Cognitive Psychology 23(4). 515–557. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vinsrygg, Synnove
1986 Time in archaeological thought: China and the West. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Yang, Wen Xing & Ying Sun
2016 A monolingual mind can have two time lines: Exploring space-time mappings in mandarin monolinguals. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 23(3). 1–8. DOI logoGoogle Scholar