Global Asia Speaker Series

Generative Contemplation:  Exploring Tibetan Buddhism Meditation across the Past and Future

David Germano, Professor of Tibetan Buddhist Studies (University of Virginia)

March 6, 2025  |  5:30 PM

The Forum, Marvin Hall 

Contemplation is found in an impressively diverse array of forms in most, if not all, of the world’s spiritual traditions.  Using Tibetan Buddhism contemplation as a reference, this talk will explore  a new scholarly framework and methodology for understanding contemplation as an innate human generative capacity rooted in  tradition-specific forms of contemplative fluency. Each tradition has its own characteristic lexicons of fundamental building blocks, grammars for how those elements are sequenced and organized to form composite wholes, and lifeworld contexts that provide these practices their full dimensionality and meaning. Specific practices then promise particular outcomes, with implicit theories of change accounting for how sustained engagement with those elements organized in those forms as shaped by these lifeworlds produce such outcomes. The presentation will use effortlessness in Tibetan Buddhist meditation as a case study to explore these issues. The second part of the presentation will then explore how such a generative analysis of contemplation can inform the fashioning of a contemplative design process and toolkit that might better guide the creation of new forms of contemplation situated in specific social contexts. It will conclude by exploring various concrete applications of such design work in scientific, technological, secular, and religious settings.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

David Germano teaches and researches Tibetan and Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia, where he is a professor in the Department of Religious Studies, as well as directs the Tibet Center.  His scholarship focuses on Tibetan esoteric traditions of Buddhist narrative, thought, and practice, particularly in the Great Perfection tradition (rdzogs chen).  He has lived for years in Tibetan communities, where he has studied Buddhism and worked extensively on programs of community engagement, participatory knowledge creation, and digital technology adapted for support and preservation of Tibetan forms of knowledge. He currently supports Tibetan entrepreneurship and the Tibetan and Himalayan Library. From 2011-2023, he directed the Contemplative Sciences Center as he worked on educational reform recentering institutions on the facilitation and support of the flourishing of students as whole individuals in the face of the crisis of wellbeing. He currently leads the Generative Contemplation Initiative, which is developing a new scholarly model and methodology for understanding Tibetan Buddhist contemplation, exploring microphenomenological research, creating a contemplative design process and toolkit, and designing new contemplative applications for specific social contexts.

Sponsored by the KU Center for East Asian Studies and Department of Religion