JCS: Thanks so much for talking with me today, James. First, we’re really interested in how your upbringing led to your being interested in contemplative practices and general spiritual openness.
JG: Yeah, that’s such a big question. For me, it was essentially a crisis—a real crisis of just growing up in a very difficult environment: a family that split up quite young, struggling economically, and being in a challenging environment. Then there are the psychological issues and pressures that come with that, depression and these kinds of things. It sort of drove me toward seeking, towards medicating myself in some way. And that eventually led to a discovery of Buddhist meditation, and then I realized that travel would be a really good idea, in my case. So I backpacked around Asia in my early 20s and connected with Tibetan lamas in India, and I started learning meditation from them. So it was a kind of crisis leading to further crisis, leading to escape, essentially, from my environment, which eventually spilled into connecting with advanced meditators who could properly identify what was going on with me. So it really changed the course of my life—these personal connections with advanced meditators, especially in Nepal, in Kathmandu. I ended up living there for about ten odd years. This was what got me into the academic study of Buddhism. It was through that channel and being connected with teachers there, and then eventually realizing: “Oh, there’s centers of study for this.” Academic work wasn’t really on my radar until quite late.
JCS: Thanks so much for sharing about your background, James. So I understand that you had no Eastern spiritual background before you went to India? Were you grounded in Western theological frameworks, or not even that?
JG: I had absolutely zero spiritual background before I went abroad. There were a few failed attempts to bring my brother and me to Sunday school. And as soon as my poor mother, who raised us alone, when we were old enough to kind of start ridiculing the service, laughing out loud (we were very misbehaved kids), she dragged us out and never made us go back.
JCS: I’m interested in the way your discovery of meditation and Eastern spirituality practices affected how you made sense of the world. You mentioned that it changed the course of your life, could you say any more on the specifics of that adjustment?
JG: My initial exposure to contemplative practice was in the Great Perfection tradition, which tends to emphasize direct introduction to the nature of the mind from a guru. You have a kind of personal relationship with a meditation guide, a guru figure, who introduces you to the nature of your mind, which then becomes the basis of your practice. For me, this was extremely transformative. The experience allowed you to arrest the discursive process without really blanking out experience. The arresting of the discursive process left a kind of non-conceptual clarity much more expansive in its sensory awareness. This openness felt like something extremely open, which we all probably experience to some degree or another in other contexts—when we’re in awe of nature, when we’re in love, when we have a real shock, or maybe when we think we’re going to die. This kind of experience. The guru points out this expansiveness, as well as the link to those other kinds of experiences.
The arresting of the discursive process left a kind of non-conceptual clarity much more expansive in its sensory awareness.
What was so striking about what happened to me and happens to so many people is that, when we have a conception of what mind is that is different from what we’re then being introduced to, it comes with a lot of baggage and cross-cultural dissonance. The mind in the Tibetan tradition is quite different from the brain and its locatedness in the head that we emphasize in the Western tradition. The usual Western sense is quite different from recognizing a subtle intelligence that is part of the larger psychophysical organism. I was struck by that dissonance when I first met a teacher who gave me these mind instructions because immediately thereafter I was given a pill, an amulet, and was told to do 100,000 prostrations in what was a devotional practice involving physical austerities. The dissonance was that my naïve, untrained capacities were in play between the experience of the pristine nature of mind as the basis of meditation and this more material and cultural devotional practice. My wanting to make sense of it all is what drove me to study the Tibetan language and textual tradition, to study with other learned people, and eventually to go on to graduate school and enter academia. So the disjunction was between what I thought was a very transformative personal contemplative experience and shift in my perception, and the importance placed on what I couldn’t make sense of, an opposition between what I construed then as cultural elements and the core of it all which was the experience I had. I’ve since then moved away from that binary of cultural trappings and core to see how mutually implicated they are, and that’s essentially been the course of my academic life and why I moved into the study of material culture in a tradition like the Great Perfection.
JCS: Building on this intersection of material culture traditions and personal experience that is at the core of your studies, how do you see this possibly impacting communities on a larger scale? I don’t want to prescribe with any leading questions, but, seeing as you’re in education I wanted to broach this topic with you. It sort of comes back to the big question of your panel, about the poly-crisis. What would you say are the affordances of your research interests for helping the world navigate the complex difficulties it finds itself in?
JG: I think it has to do with allowing the challenges of the tradition that I know and study to bring to light or denaturalize, you could say, certain kinds of running assumptions in our contemporary moment that are, to me, deeply problematic ones—the mind-body binary, the nature-culture binary. At least as I see it, these kinds of dichotomies undergird a lot of the problems that we face as a global society in terms of the eco-crisis, in terms of our relationships with the non-human world. So, the contemplative traditions I’m interested in directly challenge those binaries in ways that are not always well appreciated.We’re very quick to domesticate what we think is important about the contemplative traditions according to those binaries. There’s a kind of lip service done to what they can do, but often when they’re presented within a particular cultural matrix that operates according to these binaries, they are just domesticated according to their categories. So it is assumed they’re just there to help us adjust our minds, and we’re very quick to take the implications of those teachings, those traditions between mind and body and nature culture and the porousness that are really embodied in those traditions not very seriously as a result. The fact they’re so quickly domesticated into apps and into the very term of mindfulness has its own kind of problematic baggage. This, of course, plays into a sort of Cartesian echo chamber where it’s all about the mind—it’s very brain-centric. The research on contemplative practice, too, the instruments that we have for measuring contemplative results are all about measuring blood in the brain, for example. What’s measurable, really? What do our instruments tell us? Experiments are modeled according to, in my view, many of the assumptions that the traditions which are the very objects of study deliberately blur. You see what I’m saying? They dissect these traditions because we pretend to know what is just noise due to culture and should be kept at bay in the interest of getting to the so-called core. But I think it’s really that boundary blurring between these binaries that has the greatest potency to instruct us in this moment of crisis, and because of this, I often disagree with a lot of what’s going on in contemplative research.
The mind-body binary, the nature-culture binary […] these kinds of dichotomies undergird a lot of the problems that we face as a global society in terms of the eco-crisis.
JCS: Wow, that was lovely, James. There’s one final question I’d like to end this conversation with: Do you have any current curiosities in your material or in your practice that you see yourself pursuing next?What’s pulling you?
JG: Right now, I’m preparing another book project that involves a history of a thousand years of polemics, not around core doctrinal issues, but around issues of what counts as authentic Buddhism. I’m not the first one and certainly not the last to take a position in relation to some of the material cultural elements in Buddhism and how those relate to contemplative practice. I stand on what you could say is a side of a tradition, but there are many critics over the centuries of what were perceived to be excessive claims made for material cultural elements in the path to awakening in the Buddhist project. Tibetans argued vociferously for centuries over the role of Tibetan culture in the transmission of Indian Buddhism to Tibet, deeming things such as language, concepts, cosmologies, and material cultural elements to be Tibetan rather than Indic. So, for me, getting into those arguments has become a fascinating and very eye-opening way for looking at our contemporary moment’s domestication of the Buddhist tradition as it spreads globally. We’re actually engaging in so many analogous conversations and disputes. I think this could be an interesting way to ground this in the history of those arguments from another time when Tibetans were arguing about it coming from the Indic side or from the Chinese side (about what precisely is the role of Tibetan-ness). As Americans or Europeans are bringing Buddhist traditions in, I think they’re struggling so much with some of these things but they are often unreflective about what they’re doing. It’s my hope to bring a certain element of not just historical awareness, but a critical self-reflectivity to that process of domestication that’s simply inevitable whenever there’s spread on the cultural level. This could also address larger questions of what culture actually is. Is it the noise we must overcome to get to its core, which I find to be a very impoverished view of culture, or is it the very medium by which anything happens? Are cultures sealed off from one another? Or are they bleeding into each other and constantly overflowing in interesting ways that are neither containable nor controllable?
JCS: This was all very impassioning, James. It was a pleasure, thank you.
