Towards Contemplative Fluency: Framing Tibetan Meditation Practices
Wednesday, April 3, 2024, 6pm - 7:30pm
Eaton Humanities 250
Meditation is an ancient human practice. Our ability to artfully cultivate attentive, imaginal, and embodied modes of consciousness, and more so, intentionally design and apply techniques to transcend ordinary experience are deeply integral to the human contemplative heritage. Such practices have historically been innovated, tested, refined, and documented in magnificent diversity by the world’s great contemplative traditions. Yet, despite this historical record and an ever-growing popular interest, the study of meditation is gravely underdeveloped. In this talk, I present novel models and methods to study meditation based on a view that the underlying building-blocks and mechanisms at work in contemplative practices can be discerned, and by doing so, we can learn contemplative fluency – a practical know-how sensitive to distinct skills, contexts, and potentials. We pilot typologies of contemplative styles and contexts, discuss a generative framework, and use case examples from historical Tibetan practices to consider transdisciplinary futures of meditation research.
Michael Sheehy is a Research Assistant Professor and Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia where he directs the CIRCL: Contemplative Innovation + Research Collaborative Lab and is executive editor of the Journal of Contemplative Studies (JCS). His research translates practices from Tibetan meditation manuals to experiments and dialogues in the humanities, cultural psychology, and cognitive sciences.
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies, Tibet Himalaya Initiative and Religious Studies.
Emerging Book Cultures in Asia and the Middle East: Materiality, Paratexts, Practices
April 6 and 7, 10:30am - 5:30pm
Center for British and Irish Studies, Norlin Library
This conference brings together scholars working on a variety of textual cultures across the Asian continent, ranging from Japan to the Middle East, to consider a wide range of material and sociological aspects of the production and use of written texts: Who wrote? How did they write, using what materials and for what purpose? How does the materiality of writings relate to their function? How were texts assembled and bound to form something we might call a book?
Co-Sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies and Asian Languages and Civilizations.