Buddhist Meditation and the future of contemplation

Buddhist Meditation and the future of contemplation

Contemplative practices are a central spiritual legacy of the world’s religious traditions and are experiencing a renaissance across the world in religious, spiritual but not religious, and secular contexts. Their astonishing diversity in contexts, values, and actual methods across these traditions, however, present significant challenges in attempting to theorise and understand their full scope and dynamics. Might contemplation be best understood as a fundamental generative human capacity, and as such be profitably modelled through analogical reliance upon linguistics to explore the idea of contemplative fluency that prioritises ever changing and open ended processes over fixed products? This series will draw upon Tibetan Buddhism, one of the most diverse and self-theorised contemplative traditions in the history of the world, to explore this notion of generative contemplation, while also exploring contemporary models and methods of design thinking to consider new pathways to fashion better contemplative futures.

Lecture 1: Generative Contemplation: How can we best explore the past and future of contemplative practice?
Thursday, 17 October, 6:00pm–7.30pm

Lecture 2: The Tibetan Great Perfection Contemplative Tradition: The Poetry of Naturalism and Self- Emergence
Tuesday, 22 October, 2.15pm–3.45 pm

Lecture 3: Transitions in Transitivity: The Complexity of Effort, Effortlessness, and Agency in Tibetan Great Perfection Contemplative Practices
Thursday, 24 October, 6:00pm–7.30 pm

Lecture 4: A Dialogue on the Past and Future of Contemplation: Where do we go from here?
Tuesday, 29 October, 2.15pm–3.45 pm

Professor David Germano teaches and researches Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia, where he is a professor, as well as directs the Tibet Center. He has lived for years in Tibetan communities, where he has studied Buddhist philosophy and contemplation, and done extensive community engagement work. His personal scholarship has focused on the Great Perfection (rdzogs chen) tradition in its many dimensions. For over a decade, he led large scale explorations of contemplative ideas, values, and practices in relationship to scientific frameworks and creative applications in education in service of facilitating student flourishing. Currently he leads the Generative Contemplation Initiative, which explores contemplation as a generative human capacity with distinctive lexicons, grammars, and contexts and considers how we can design better contemplative futures.

The University Buddhist Education Foundation (UBEF) Visiting Professorship in Buddhist Studies was established at the University of Sydney in 2009 through the generosity of the UBEF for the purpose of sponsoring an extended visit to Sydney of a distinguished international scholar in any field of Buddhist Studies in order to expose students and academics to current trends in research and to raise the profile of Buddhist Studies in Australia. It is administered by the Discipline of Asian Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures. Past recipients were Professors Peter Skilling (EFEO, 2009), Geoffrey Samuel (University of Cardiff, 2010), Karen Lang (Virginia, 2011), Bernard Faure (Columbia, 2012), David Eckel (Boston University, 2013), Richard Salomon (University of Washington, 2016), Lara Braitstein (McGill University, 2018), Michael Zimmerman (University of Hamburg, 2019), John Powers (ANU, 2021) and Professor Jason Neelis (Wilfrid Laurier University, 2023).

If you are unable to attend in person, you are welcome to join via Zoom using this link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/84097362398
For further information, please contact Flavio Geisshuessler (flavio.geisshuessler@sydney.edu.au).