Articles
Original scholarship published on a rolling basis
About
The Journal of Contemplative Studies regularly publishes original research and scholarship on topics related to the world’s contemplative traditions — historical and contemporary, religious and secular. Articles are not restricted to a particular disciplinary or methodological approach as long as scholarship is deeply grounded in the humanities or transdisciplinary scholarship with a humanistic core, and adheres to the journal’s Focus and Scope. Articles are reviewed and published on a rolling basis, either independently, or within a Special Issue. Details about how to submit an article are on the Submissions page.
Recent Articles
-
This article comprises an introduction to and annotated translation of passages from the Unimpeded Sound Tantra (Sgra thal ‘gyur) and one of its earliest known commentaries from the twelfth century. The passages describe divination practices involving the interpretation of elemental signs that manifest as omens in the sky to determine a community’s collective karma and destinies. The article explores how these materials invite reconsiderations of Buddhist contemplatives as world-abdicating renunciates, emphasizing instead a vision of contemplative life immersed within the overlapping social domains of human, non-human, and more-than-human beings.October 23, 2025 | Special Issue #03: Contemplative Ecology | 15 pages
-
According to Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi’s view, canonical Phenomenology is specifically concerned with analyzing the mind-world dyad and its theoretical implications for philosophy and science. Despite widespread adoption in therapy and research, they claim that mindfulness is ambiguously described as the practice of bare attention and nonjudgment, either on perceptual objects or subjective acts. Thus, comparisons that liken Phenomenology to mindfulness are inaccurate because mindfulness is primarily concerned with how we experience the world. Furthermore, such comparisons have misconstrued Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological attitude and method of epoché and reduction, resulting in a lax usage of the term “Phenomenology.” However, I argue that within their originating soteriological milieu, meditative practices like mindfulness are no less concerned with knowledge of reality than Phenomenology.September 30, 2025 | Special Issue #02: Mindful Practices and Embodied Critical Thinking: Tensions and Transitions | 27 pages
-
While many martial arts include meditation as a part of their practice, some are regarded as being essentially spiritual exercises. Moreover, in a variety of religious traditions, certain forms of prayer and meditation are conceived as preparation for engagement in “spiritual combat.” Most immediately, these practices are designed to enhance one’s capacity to control attention, to defend it from forces that attempt to capture it. I argue in this essay that such a capacity is morally significant. Our behavior is most readily subject to ethical evaluation when it is deliberate behavior, that is, in instances when we are paying careful attention to what we are doing. Moreover, paying attention is itself a kind of doing, something that we can do poorly or well, or fail to do altogether. Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch made this last claim the centerpiece of their philosophy, the foundational insight that grounds an “ethics of attention.” My goal in this essay is to explore the relationship between martial spirituality and an ethics of attention. Toward that end, philosophical pragmatists like William James and Charles Peirce will also prove to be important sources of insight.
September 10, 2025 | Special Issue #02: Mindful Practices and Embodied Critical Thinking: Tensions and Transitions | 16 pages
-
Buddhist amulets have been a topic of academic research for decades. But scholarly presuppositions that amulets have circulated primarily in popular Buddhist milieus, related only tangentially to the pursuits of elite practitioners, has limited our appreciation of how amulets have inflected philosophical and contemplative concerns. This article aims to challenge this lopsided perspective by showing how Buddhists in Tibet integrated analytic contemplation into the practice of writing down, wearing, and putting into practice short tantric scriptures that claim to liberate through wearing.June 26, 2025 | Special Issue #04: Philosophy and Contemplation in Tantric Buddhism | 38 pages
-
Building on the works of the Sufi philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr and the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa, this article argues that the climate crisis signals a deeper spiritual and existential crisis beyond technological solutions and carbon reduction strategies. Departing from conventional problem-solution narratives, it frames climate change as a crisis of human self-understanding and our relationship with the more-than-human world. By integrating Sufi ontology with ethics, it advocates for an interconnected vision of life by treating everything in nature as alive and spiritually meaningful.
June 2, 2025 | Special Issue #03: Contemplative Ecology | 22 pages
-
The strange and alluring idea, that “Love’s deepest abyss is her most beautiful form,” shared by many of the apophatic tradition, reflects the sense that the abyssal is essential to the work of love, and that love can only be known by relinquishing the narrow conception of the self and becoming lost in the depths. The idea of the abyss has reemerged in our own time as part of a painful grammar of loss: a way of engaging and responding to social, political, cultural, environmental, spiritual, and personal losses too deep to name but impossible to ignore. It has also become critical to the work of reimagining the immense value of what we are losing, rekindling our capacity to love what is most precious to us, and helping us recover a sense of a shared life with all sentient beings. And it has become part of an emerging “contemplative ecology of darkness”—a radical spiritual practice that can help us learn again how to behold ourselves and other living beings as part of a larger whole.
May 13, 2025 | Special Issue #03: Contemplative Ecology | 31 pages
-
Nan Shepherd (1893–1981) was a Scottish novelist, poet, educator, and mountaineer. Her primary work of nonfiction, The Living Mountain, concerns the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. More than a work of natural and cultural history, in this book Shepherd also recounts engaging in intentional practices for cultivating attention and sense perception. Although these practices and goals are uniquely her own, this paper will also consider the potential influence of a Victorian-era publication summarizing Buddhist teachings. In contrast to previous scholarship on Shepherd, this paper contends that we would do well to resist characterizing Shepherd’s experiences in the Cairngorms in Buddhist terms.
April 22, 2025 | Special Issue #03: Contemplative Ecology | 11 pages
-
Dharmakīrti’s view of yogic perception (yogipratyakṣa) and mental cultivation (bhāvanā) has generated a good deal of discussion—in Dharmakīrti’s text tradition, in the works of its various critics, and in the contemporary study of Buddhist philosophy. However, tantric authors’ appeals to yogic perception are at odds with Dharmakīrti’s intentions in important ways. In this paper, I show why this appropriation of Dharmakīrti on yogic perception might be surprising, and then I reveal a tantalizing thread of Dharmakīrtian thinking about cultivation that nevertheless runs through certain Sanskrit Buddhist tantric debates.
April 3, 2025 | Special Issue #04: Philosophy and Contemplation in Tantric Buddhism | 30 pages
-
What happens to researchers interested in spirituality, as they engage with a large number of spiritual exemplars? This question is explored, based on the experience of 14 research collaborators in a qualitative phenomenological study of spiritual exemplars of different traditions, paths, and cultures. Over 5.5 months, two groups of research collaborators watched video recordings of interviews with 20 spiritual exemplars, analyzed their transcripts, wrote down their impressions of each exemplar, and discussed them in biweekly meetings. At the end of that period, the effects of the process on the collaborators were explored through individual interviews and group discussions. The conditions that contributed to the effects of the process and the potential of its application to facilitate interreligious dialogue and personal growth are discussed.
March 7, 2025 | Special Issue #02: Mindful Practices and Embodied Critical Thinking: Tensions and Transitions | 31 pages
-
What does a particular place and its unique yet integrated life-force do for our lamentation amid ecocide? Do we suppose that nature mourns for us? Restores us to full resurrection? I avoid either/or solutions as at best a misplaced romantic optimism and at worst escapism enabling capitalist exploitation. Rather, I draw upon Christian mystics Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and John of the Cross alongside contemporary nonfiction authors Robert Macfarlane and Annie Dillard to move us beyond metaphor into the material. Masters of holding complicated paradoxical truths in real bodies and time, they wake the dying and entice us into spiritual practices as poets of apocatastasis, postulants of apophatic energy, and epistemologies of integration.
February 13, 2025 | Special Issue #03: Contemplative Ecology | 21 pages
-
The paper aims to shed further light on the boran kammaṭṭhāna, or “old meditation,” tradition by providing a summary and an analysis of a meditation manual titled “Baep Doen That” (literally, “Model for walking the elements”) attributed to the Supreme Patriarch Suk Kai Thuean (1733–1822), the fourth Saṅgharāja of Bangkok, Thailand. The analysis of the manual incorporates the author’s interviews with Phra Khru Sitthisangwon (Wira Ṭhanāvīro) of Wat Ratchasittharam, the current lineage holder of Supreme Patriarch Suk’s meditation.
April 2, 2025 | Special Issue #04: Philosophy and Contemplation in Tantric Buddhism | 22 pages
-
Contemplative ecologies seem to face two liabilities of injustice. This essay examines how Contemplative Ecology may matter for multispecies justice by following Pope Francis’s attempt to redefine human dominion in contemplative terms for the sake of response to climate and extinction crises. That theological shift is accompanied by elevations of Indigenous governance rights and of rights for nature, although neither is endorsed fully or consistently. Ambiguities in this case can illuminate overarching questions about the relation of contemplative practice to ecological justice.
January 30, 2025 | Special Issue #03: Contemplative Ecology | 25 pages
-
Buddhist thinkers in Tibet, most especially those associated with Tibet’s Nyingma or Old School of Buddhism, have produced a rich and understudied current of tantric philosophy advancing the authority, validity, and rationality of the tantric view. This paper examines the text, Establishing Appearance as Divine (Snang ba lhar bsgrub pa) by Rongzom (fl. 11th–12th c.). It is our earliest documented instance of a Tibetan “tantric pramāṇa”—that is, an approach characterized by the philosophical integration of exoteric philosophical thought and esoteric ritual and ideology. As such, and in contrast to more narrowly focused studies of Tibetan ritual or Tibetan philosophy, this paper details the form, content, and context of Rongzom’s tantric pramāṇa or epistemological discourse in terms of both classical epistemology and Buddhist Tantra. This study thus sheds light on the relationship envisioned between ritual and philosophy in traditions of Vajrayāna.
December 20, 2024 | Special Issue #04: Philosophy and Contemplation in Tantric Buddhism | 48 pages
-
After a century and a half of focus on Buddhist doctrine, academic attention is increasingly being paid to practice. What remains undertheorized, however, is the relation between the two. Despite its prevalence, the dichotomous representation of doctrine and practice is methodologically dysfunctional. As an alternative, it is proposed that the relation between doctrine and practice is better understood as dialectical, sometimes represented in Buddhist literature by the image of “the two wings of a bird.” This relation is explored by examining a particular tantric ritual, a Shingon homa.
November 19, 2024 | Special Issue #04: Philosophy and Contemplation in Tantric Buddhism | 29 pages
-
The religious or spiritual value of contemplative practices and the use of psychedelics is not intrinsic to experiences obtained through them and is instead relational—a function of how they alter consciousness. Hershock presents a nonreductive, nondualist Buddhist account of consciousness that calls critically into question the merits of both physicalist and phenomenalist reductionism, makes a Buddhist case for seeing that changes in subjective experience are at best provisional goals of these alterations, and draws some challenging inferences regarding the dynamics of contemplative practice, and more.October 1, 2024 | Special Issue #01: Psychedelics, Contemplation, and Religion | 20 pages
-
This article introduces a novel method presently in development that integrates ethnography and visual elicitation techniques to explore meditative experiences and investigate consciousness. Central to this method is the utilization of mandala-like images as a means to capture the dynamic evolution of consciousness during contemplative practices. This article provides an illustrative case study that scrutinizes the method’s potential applications and contributions within the domain of anthropological research on contemplative practices.August 6, 2024 | 40 pages
-
Hesychasm is a form of monastic asceticism rooted in the tradition of the Desert Fathers and given a systematic articulation by the Byzantine author Gregory Palamas (1296–1359). This article considers how the mystical experiences described in Palamas’s Triads compare to the altered states at the center of contemporary psychedelic research, turning to the discipline of Comparative Theology as a helpful framework to bring into dialogue the hesychastic understanding of deification as a trajectory grounded in the reception of the sacraments and the therapeutic impact of psychedelic experiences.
May 9, 2024 | Special Issue #01: Psychedelics, Contemplation, and Religion | 19 pages
-
The psychoactive plant Datura metel appears across a range of traditions in premodern South Asia including the form of tantric Buddhism (Vajrayāna) located in the yoginī tantras, where the plant is most prominently used in instructions for bringing about magical acts (ṣaṭkarman). This paper explores the possibility that datura was consumed for its hallucination-inducing potential by considering how the plant was viewed and used in premodern South Asia through an ethnobotanical approach to relevant texts. It argues that the material potency of the plant as a dangerous poison gave it a magical potency that made it a favored ingredient in several hostile magic rites (abhicāra) and suggests that the line between material and magical is an inappropriate distinction to draw when examining these tantras.
February 29, 2024 | Special Issue #01: Psychedelics, Contemplation, and Religion | 32 pages
-
This study delves into Cheng Yi’s Ruist (Confucian) contemplative practices, addressing a gap in contemplative studies from a Ruist perspective. These practices, including quiet-sitting meditation, beholding, calligraphy, and restful sleep, emerged during political and social crises, amid diverse interpretations of Ruist classics and the influences of Buddhism and Daoism. Cheng Yi’s approach provides valuable comparative insights for contemporary contemplative studies and guidance for practitioners seeking to balance intellectualism, contemplation, and ethical action.
September 28, 2023 | 46 pages
-
Relationships between religious and scientific worldviews are important factors in exploring meditation-related challenges for Western Buddhist meditators. Interviews with sixty-eight meditators and thirty-three meditation experts were analyzed to examine how they understand these relationships, which were observed to be conflicting, compatible, nested, discrete, and complementary. These dynamics suggest an expansion of existing understandings of the relationships between science and religion as they apply to Buddhist meditators.
April 13, 2023 | 28 pages
Recent Reviews
-
Elizabeth McDougal’s The Words and World of Ge bcags Nunnery: Tantric Meditation in Context is a pioneering ethnographic study of a Nyingma nunnery located in the Eastern Tibet region of Nangchen, in present-day Qinghai province in China.
September 25, 2025 | 6 pages
-
This review discusses Marcia Falk’s Night of Beginnings, a reimagined Passover Haggadah designed to inspire contemplative practice. Falk combines poetic liturgy, gender-inclusive language, and mystical reflections to offer new interpretations of traditional Jewish texts. She emphasizes the importance of personal and communal transformation, focusing on connection, humility, and compassion rather than power and exclusion. Through her creative blessings, storytelling, and visual art, Falk invites readers to experience the Passover Seder as a dynamic ritual filled with beauty, renewal, and spiritual depth.
October 18, 2024 | 6 pages
-
This review explores how urban green spaces can promote mental well-being through intentional design informed by neuroscience, as discussed by Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo in Neuroscience for Designing Green Spaces: Contemplative Landscapes, published in 2023. The book introduces the Contemplative Landscape Model, a framework identifying seven features that enhance contemplative experiences in built environments. Mayse discusses why the book is a significant contribution to the field of Contemplative Studies, and what more there is to be done.
September 17, 2024 | 1 page
-
This review examines this expansive and valuable recently edited volume on the study of meditation. Dawson attends to larger conceptual orientations of the volume and its specific contributions in his review, and finds that “the breadth of different approaches to meditation is, in fact, one of the Handbook’s prime virtues…. Discussions of meditation are polyphonic—they comprise many voices. The plurality of voices is, however, balanced by listening; conversations take place on these pages. The Handbook amply displays the diverse multidisciplinary discussions underway in the field of meditation studies.”
December 18, 2023 | 6 pages
-
This review discusses a helpful edited volume featuring recent scholarship on yoga and meditation studies that address the question: “What exactly is meditation?” In response, the editors “aim to expand the focus of meditation studies to show the diversity of South Asian meditation, including discussions of teachers writing in Telegu, Tamil, Malayalam, and other languages and texts including not only texts about meditation but also songs, poems, letters, and popular devotions. These discussions show the multiplicity of Hindu and South Asian forms of meditation and yoga, engaged in interreligious encounter with Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Islam, and Christianity.”
September 15, 2023 | 3 pages
-
This review outlines and evaluates the contributions of this important edited volume on recent scholarship about the philosophy of meditation. “Throughout this Handbook, we find different ways of understanding both philosophy and meditation, as well as their relationship. Some authors highlight the apparent tensions between the two, while others, the apparent harmony…. Anyone interested in the philosophy of meditation will undoubtedly be inspired by [this]… meaningful contribution to establishing this subfield within the academe.”
May 17, 2023 | 7 pages