What is Contemplation?: An Interview with Erik Braun

Conducted by Adam Liddle, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Contemplative Sciences Center and the Associate Editor for the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

JCS: What is contemplation?

EB: Before our conversation started, I was thinking about the issue of contemplation as a term of art in Buddhist Studies. I realized that, while the term is very familiar, I don’t often encounter it in my work on the history of Buddhist meditation, if at all. The word seems to show up mostly as an adjective, as in “Contemplative Science” or “Contemplative Studies,” to designate a recent field of research with a practical bent, aiming at understanding the use of methods of self-cultivation and self-development. It’s an interesting choice, because contemplation as a term has associations for me with rumination, in other words a deliberate even discursive consideration of a particular entity or subject or what have you. Yet it is clear that, nowadays, contemplation as it’s understood in Contemplative Studies can indicate particular kinds of mental habits and patterns of practice that aren’t necessarily involved with ratiocination but rather a kind of broader self-cultivation. The term’s meaning seems to have shifted to a more holistic sense.

That shift does connect it to one of the topics that has most interested me, which is meditation or, to use the Pāli term found in Theravāda Buddhism, bhāvanā. This is the idea of cultivation that involves practices that are not specifically about topics of discursive inquiry but rather are ways to shape the self. That shaping is involved with various somatic and mental practices that are much more about—well, then it gets a little tricky what they are exactly about, but they usually do not involve overt thought. Instead, they are the sort of self-cultivation that involves a transformation through observation, I guess you’d say.

That’s a winding way to say that contemplation as a term hasn’t always obviously mapped on to the meaning of what I’ve studied and understood as meditation. But I do understand that now as a term it’s come to include some of the same practices and concerns that have interested me. And finally, I see that contemplation as a term can incorporate or leave space for a wide range of religious, spiritual, and even secular traditions that aren’t tied to any one historical trajectory. It is a term that’s capacious enough and novel enough to include a whole range of possible experiences and practices. I think it probably has a lot of utility in that regard.

JCS: Do you think that the cultural imagination around contemplation differs in modern America compared to the historical studies you’ve look at in Southeast Asia?

Such ideas, swirling around and undergirding the term contemplation, are contingent and complicated and, inevitably, in flux… While cultural imaginations across time and space don’t repeat, they sometimes rhyme.

EB: There are clearly huge differences, even as there has been something of a convergence, given that the term contemplation, as I was just saying, has come to incorporate ideas and practices that you would find in Pāli texts, those texts in the classical language of Southeast Asian Buddhism. But when you look at specific terms like samatha (śamatha in Sanskrit), calming or serenity, or vipassanā (Sanskrit vipaśyanā), insight into the nature of reality—these terms would not include some of the other senses that contemplation now leaves room for. In other words, contemplation can be taken to include many Buddhist practices, but some common Buddhist terms would typically not include contemplation in its more extended senses.

I don’t want to push that too far because it’s true that in South and Southeast Asian contexts, and in its textual traditions, there is a strong sense of the importance of discursive study, intellectual consideration, and even rumination and thought, what is termed pariyatti in Pāli. It often plays a critical role in supporting what’s called paṭipatti, or meditative practice. In fact, there can be a lot of gray area in between the two. Intellectual study can thus be part and parcel of the way in which you transform yourself, at least initially. It is a form of cultivation. So, Buddhist meditation in the sense of that term I used earlier, bhāvanā, can certainly include the idea of practices that might fall within the notion of contemplation. But the more specific techniques of practice have not tended to be as discursive as contemplation as a term might suggest, and, it seems to me, they tend to delimit cultivation more closely within a Buddhist worldview.

I’ve spoken in a somewhat strict sense about the resonances of terms as they relate to practice. But the expression you use, “cultural imagination,” also brings up senses of self-cultivation, not only in different places but in different times. And these senses index to profoundly divergent ideas of who might be engaged in practice. These divergences raise the larger issue of what sort of person a term like contemplation assumes. My remarks are meant to suggest such ideas, swirling around and undergirding the term contemplation, are contingent and complicated and, inevitably, in flux. This is a way to get at the idea that while cultural imaginations across time and space don’t repeat, they sometimes rhyme.

JCS: Do you think that the gap between the term contemplation as we understand it and the ways it’s historically been used in the areas that you study is productive for us in Contemplative Studies to incorporate more things? Should we be refining our definition to a more historical lens of what contemplation has been in terms of self-cultivation? 

EB: These are very good questions, and they definitely require ongoing reflection. As I noted earlier, contemplation hasn’t really been used commonly in the study of Theravāda Buddhism as a historical entity. Yet, again, the word has real utility—for one thing, because it is more capacious and can include a wider range of not just practices within a tradition but practices beyond any particular tradition. One struggles to find a term that can include them all. In that sense, contemplation has a pragmatic value, more so than perhaps meditation, which has strong associations with Asian practices. I might add, too, that contemplation does have certain Christian resonances to it, which is perhaps inevitable in an American or European-American context. I don’t know if in any interviews you’ve done you’ve spoken to people who sense that more strongly and perhaps resist it. I don’t think it has such a strong affect that people would inevitably be put off by that potential resonance—it could even attract some people!—but I do appreciate the possibility. Leaving that aside, as I’ve said, contemplation has this capacious quality that could be quite useful.

More is going on than just sitting down and discovering truth… There’s often a lot of formative self-engineering that’s gone on to prepare one for that moment. You know the old joke: meditation, it’s not what you think. But it is what you thought before you sat down to not think.

Now, as I also mentioned just a little while ago, it is true that in the Southeast Asian context, there is a sense in which intellectual work is very much part of the whole process of self-cultivation that ideally would eventuate in meditation. Of course, most Buddhists don’t meditate, insofar as it is construed as this very specific kind of technical activity. And, as I’ve said, in the Buddhist context those kinds of techniques and practices of self-cultivation don’t tend to be very discursive, at least in the Theravada setting. Contemplation, however, might be a useful term to remind us that what is going on there—I mean even in actual meditative practice or patipatti—has always included far more than just the exercise of a technique. Furthermore, contemplation incorporates such practices into a broader framework outside Buddhism or any religion. So, in that sense, if it’s a term that can jump a gap that is more apparent than real—between specific techniques and broader forms of self-development—it could be a quite useful tool. Because it’s certainly the case that when we look at how insight meditation as a practice was empowered by the study of Abhidhamma (Abhidharma in Sanskrit), we see an example of how this very abstruse technical analysis of the nature of reality—that’s to say, the Abhidhamma—was the necessary groundwork to insight practice in Burma. And if we want to attend to that as contemplation, while it may not be the only way, it could be an effective way to signal that more is going on than just sitting down and discovering truth in the process of the technique itself. There’s often a lot of formative self-engineering that’s gone on to prepare one for that moment. You know the old joke: meditation, it’s not what you think. But it is what you thought before you sat down to not think.

I see what I’m saying here as amounting to a call to pay attention to historical developments, because doing so allows us to think about contemplation as incorporating what you call a historical lens. Historical study enables us to refine and, to push the metaphor, continually redirect and refocus our lenses in order to look clearly at present-day and future developments on the basis of how we’ve gotten to where we are.

JCS: That’s great, thanks! We started talking about it a little bit, but how is contemplation relevant in your own work and your research? You’re wide ranging in the things that you study. Where does contemplation show up and how have you been engaging with it?

EB: Contemplation, if we take it in this broadly construed way as we’ve just described, is at the heart of a lot of what I’m doing. Because I’m interested not just in the development of practices but in the mindsets that make them plausible and appealing, and these are both historical products. Initially, I was driven by the question of how insight (vipassanā) became a mass practice. Particularly, I was looking at Burma, the area in which I’ve specialized, and working in Burmese and Pāli texts. I was looking at what intellectual transformations took place during the colonial period in Burma that enabled the use of long-standing traditional resources like the Pāli textual corpus to respond to social challenges and pressures. In other words, I was looking at what social and intellectual developments enabled the mass practice of meditation, particularly among lay people—something that had never happened before. That research became The Birth of Insight.

I am still working on projects involving Pāli literature and Burmese Buddhism, but the Burmese meditation project has now also segued into a look at how key American figures have come to respond to their own particular pressures and needs and questions in ways that have been deeply shaped by their relationship with that Burmese context. If my work in Burma asked why mass meditation started there like nowhere else, my American project is asking why meditation has taken off here so spectacularly in ways that partly depend on those Burmese developments. Overall, one of the things that has really interested me is the dance between continuity and innovation. In the Burmese context, you see strong continuities with intellectual traditions that stretch back quite a long way into the pre-colonial period. But, of course, this goes along with novel responses to the colonial moment. In America, we see the ways in which people, such as the figures at the Insight Meditation Society but more broadly among the spiritual seeker culture from the 1960s up to the present day, have been drawing on their own distinctive continuities in terms of how they engage with Pāli texts and intellectual traditions. They’re often fairly self-aware about the continuities they have with South and Southeast Asian Theravāda Buddhism, even as they innovate through secularization, through the simplification of meditative processes, and through the promotion of ecumenical, combinative visions that draw from long-standing American religious sensibilities—indeed, the kind of sensibility that might be inclined to embrace a broad sense of contemplation! And so, you see this fascinating way in which contemplation becomes its own distinct entity in particular moments that most definitely has inheritances from the past, even as it’s undergoing change through contemporary circumstances.

JCS: That’s really interesting work. Thanks for sharing. As you look at the field of Contemplative Studies, what do you see as the emerging trends? What kind of work is going on out there that you’re really interested in, that you’re excited about seeing grow more?

EB: At the broadest level, what has interested me, probably most centrally, is fundamental shifts in ideas of subjectivity. That’s an abstract way of saying that, over time, people come to develop profoundly innovative ideas about who they are and how they make their way through the world by their engagement with a body of knowledge that instructs and shapes their ideas of particular practices. Those particular practices, in turn, feed back into the power and strength of these larger visions about the nature of the world that made sense of those practices. So, it’s a feedback loop where the practice reinforces ideas, even as those ideas reinforce those practices. Through this looping there’s an ongoing development of notions about who we are. So, this has practical ramifications in terms of questions like, What careers are appropriate? Do I have children? What sort of loving relationships do I form? What sort of platonic relationships? All these aspects of what matter to people in their lives come to be shaped and reshaped by these practices and the ideas that swirl around them. At the most general level, that’s what interests me, and I see it reflected in current work that takes a sort of cultural turn in its approach to meditation.

One example of a distinctive development in the Western context along these lines that has gone on for a while now is the fusion of meditation with the therapeutic sensibility. Philip Rieff talked about this quite a long time ago in his book The Triumph of the Therapeutic. He talked about the ideas of wellness, self-flourishing, and wholeness as fundamental goods in the emergence of what he calls “psychological man”—we might say the “psychological person.” That’s at the heart of what this sort of person is about, this sense of well-being on this psychological level. And that transforms meditation’s purpose—though, in turn, meditation can alter what flourishing means. It goes both ways. So, I’m really interested in how ideas of self-cultivation and meditation, what we’re calling here contemplation, changes these ideas about who we are and what we do. Metacritically, then, Contemplative Studies or Contemplative Sciences are also exciting not just as fields of inquiry but as the extensions of ideas about the practitioner—in other words, as objects of study themselves.

All these aspects of what matter to people in their lives come to be shaped and reshaped by these practices and the ideas that swirl around them.

JCS: Finally, I’m curious about some of your favorite books in Contemplative Studies—things you might recommend. What are you reading?

EB: More than particular books, particular scholars come to mind as essential to the field. David McMahan has written a lot that is extremely valuable for placing meditation within transnational and local contexts. His recent book Rethinking Meditation is sure to become necessary reading for anyone interested in Contemplative Sciences. It is on the cutting edge of analyzing the developments of Contemplative Studies at a metacritical level, particularly in terms of Buddhism. It came out fairly recently. Work by John Dunne has often sought to build a bridge that links humanistic study, most especially Buddhist studies, with cognitive science. For some years now, this has been by virtue of his position at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin, where he has worked closely with cognitive scientists. And then, stepping back a little further, Robert Sharf’s work on the nature of experience and claims regarding meditation within Buddhist traditions was a critical reality check to the field. He called people’s attention to the fact that what we’re looking at here does have a contextual origination, and there are explanations for it that one can derive from historical study, not just from a quick move to the universal. I think that is really, really useful as well.

More broadly, there’s the philosopher Charles Taylor. He has not written about Buddhism, besides the most cursory remarks, and he never takes up meditation as a focal topic. But he has doorstop books, Sources of the Self and A Secular Age, as well as a short little book called The Ethics of Authenticity that describe the nature and origins of the Western outlook and engage with the assumptions that outlook entails, its presuppositions or what we might call its deep background. I find his work rich and generative in understanding what has gone on in terms of specific choices that are made by the modern person—and in particular the person formed within what Taylor calls the “master narratives” of Western culture. This is very general, but these are some of the thinkers and sources that have been useful for me. These alone would occupy somebody for quite a while! Though I should add that many other scholars have done important work on this topic.

JCS: Those are all really great. I’m very curious to read some of those myself.  Thanks a lot for sitting down and talking with me. This was really lovely.

EB: Thanks for chatting. It’s been great. I really enjoyed it.