Conducted by Adam Liddle, Associate Editor for the Journal of Contemplative Studies.
JCS: OK, let’s dive in. So what is contemplation?
HR: Many people don’t want to define it at all and want to leave it up to individuals. But contemplation isn’t just whatever you want it to be. It isn’t just, “I’m going to go wander out in nature and look at the leaves.” That’s fine and that’s a nice practice. But what is distinctively contemplative about it? I’ve also been involved in contemplative education. And there I pose the same question: What is distinctive about the contemplative approach to education that cannot be found in other approaches?
For me, contemplation involves, first and foremost, attentional focus, and if it’s done in a sustained fashion, it very often leads to deepened states of concentration and tranquility. It can also sometimes lead to a broadening of the awareness, not only in the moment but also on a continuing basis, and to a greater sense of perspective on the intersectional contexts in which one is embedded, including family, society, and environment. And that can lead to a variety of other-regarding virtues. So as the constantly flowing contents of consciousness begin to slow down, and you start to see the world from beyond your individual sense of self-identity, then it kind of opens you up to see how you connect with others, how you relate to others, and it leads to these other-regarding virtues like empathy, like compassion, like the Chinese Confucian concept of ren, which is translated as humaneness, or sympathy or empathy. It’s really like a combination of all three.
Contemplation involves, first and foremost, attentional focus, and if it’s done in a sustained fashion, it very often leads to deepened states of concentration and tranquility.
In the longer term, if you sustain the practice, it can lead to a kind of decentering of the self as the dominant characteristic of your moment-to-moment experience, and then you start to become more aware of other people and things, more open to understanding yourself and others. This decentering, which I have not only come to understand through my intellectual study of classical Chinese philosophy and religion, but also experienced through Zen practice, can be linked to the following idea from Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945), the greatest Japanese philosopher of the 20th century: “It is not that experience exists because there is an individual; but that an individual exists because there is experience.”
So, for Nishida, the individual, personal self arises from a continuum of experience. If you start to appreciate that, of course, that leads to what you might call a decentering of yourself, and leads you to be more open and receptive to your environment, more open to flow experiences, more present in your relationships, and more skilled in second-person intersubjective communication.
In contemplative practice you always begin by the focusing of the attention in a sustained fashion on something. And each tradition has often a variety of things that you focus on, topics of meditation, and topics of attentional focus. So there has to be attentional focus in contemplation. And if you keep doing it, then the other things that I’m talking about will eventually come about. In recent publications I borrowed something from neuroscientific research on meditation: the distinguishing between practices, states, and traits.
Using that framework, I’ve gone back through my classical Daoist sources, and there’s actually a variety of different methods and objects that they’re trying out for attentional focus. There are the famous fourth century BCE methods like “the fasting of the mind” and “sitting and forgetting” from the Zhuangzi, and other less famous ones like focusing on the one word “Dao” from the “Inward Training” (Neiye) text in the Guanzi. In this latter technique, they seem to be doing a practice very similar to the mantra meditation of early Indic religions. In my second book, Original Tao, I argue that this text, which was buried in a collection of 76 texts mostly devoted to political and economic thought that came out of the early Chinese state of Qi, is older than the Daodejing—that this text contains the first references to breathing meditation in the entire Chinese tradition, which means all of East Asia, and that we can date it to 340 to 350 BCE.
I used to get into arguments in graduate school with some of my professors about their beliefs that nobody meditated in China before Buddhism came in. Now we know that this is just not true. It’s just one of those beliefs that is punctured by the evidence that has emerged over the last four decades, and also by bringing the perspective of contemplative practice into scholarship, using what I have called a “contemplative hermeneutic.” We have all these different ways of interpreting texts. Of course, a lot of our information going back to the fourth century BCE comes from texts; but some of it comes from archaeology. Sometimes the archaeological record complicates the textual record, but occasionally it supports it. And so, in fact, we have a text from the rich cache of texts discovered in Tomb #3 at the village of Mawangdui near the modern city of Changsha, which was sealed in 168 BCE. It’s called the “Ten Questions” (Shiwen), and in it there’s a reference to circulating the qi (vital energy / vital breath) in a kneeling position while remaining perfectly still. From this description the practice seems to very closely resemble what in Japan is called the seiza position, the kind of kneeling Japanese people do on tatami mats. My Japanese friends tell me it’s comfortable; I find it somewhat torturous.
Over the course of my 40 or so years in the academic world, most of the time concentrating on scholarship on classical Daoism, I have slowly developed this idea of applying what I have come to call a contemplative hermeneutic to the interpretation of premodern texts on Chinese philosophy and religion. It’s not enough to identify the basic ideas in these texts, by using our intellectual functions alone to logically analyze them. It’s also important to bring the more fully embodied perspective of contemplative practice in order to develop and defend hypotheses about the experiences that that led to the ideas about the nature of human experience and of the world in which human beings found themselves that are present in these works.
JCS: Thanks for all of that! I love the idea of a contemplative hermeneutic. You’ve already started talking about it, but how does contemplation intersect your work, both as a researcher and educator?
HR: When it comes to discussing the importance of bringing a more embodied subjective experience into scholarship and research on the nature of consciousness, and on contemplative practices, it makes people very uncomfortable. It opens up the question that I call “the elephant in the room”: Should scientists and humanists practice the traditions they’re studying? The concern about this is that having such a practice automatically biases the research and scholarship that one does. Yet without that first-person, practical knowledge of contemplative techniques and methods, one has a much shallower knowledge base from which to interpret the meaning of ideas in texts or develop proper experimental approaches. I just organized and shared a postconference workshop on this topic at the second International Society for Contemplative Research meeting in Padova, Italy, last June, and it seems that there is finally some interest among both scientists and humanists in discussing the pros and cons of doing this. When I had first tried to introduce this consideration at the Mind and Life Summer Research Institute in 2007, there was a very pronounced and extensive silence in the room. And, of course, the field of Religious Studies has most often completely excluded any first-person approaches. But I think the time has come to figure out ways to integrate first-person and third-person epistemologies in the study of the full range of human contemplative experiences across cultures and across times, and from scientific, humanistic, and artistic approaches. This is what we do in the courses we have developed at Brown University in the now decade-old major we have created in Contemplative Studies.
As the constantly flowing contents of consciousness begin to slow down, and you start to see the world from beyond your individual sense of self-identity, then it kind of opens you up to see how you connect with others…
From the perspective of teaching university students, first-person methods are not only pedagogically significant but also personally significant; they have this dual impact in students’ lives. I know this from the many students who have written to me even years after graduation. Students write to me and say things like, “the only thing I remember from my entire four years at Brown is that meditation practice you taught.” So obviously there’s a significant personal benefit for students to learn about contemplative practices in this first-person experiential way. However, we can never lose sight of the fact that doing these first-person practices at the same time we are studying texts written about them gives a significant additional insight into the meaning of these texts. It’s like the complementary learning of reading a recipe and actually trying to make it. In about half of our courses we have created what we call “meditation labs.” These are empirical first-person experiments with different contemplative techniques in weekly classes that are scheduled like laboratory sections in science courses. These complement the third-person readings of texts and other works about the cultural and historical context for the contemplative practices we are studying in any given week.
Of course not all of our classes have a meditation lab in them because some are science courses, and some are in humanities or art courses in which the instructors do not feel competent to also be contemplative teachers. In order to help those colleagues and those in other courses, both at Brown and in other institutions that would like to add a critical contemplative component to their courses but do not know where to turn in order to do that, we set up something we call the Virtual Contemplative Mentors in Residence. For this program we have three advanced practitioners, all of whom to this point have PhDs. Thus they understand well the academic environment, and the limits of what can and cannot be insisted upon in a classroom setting. This avoids even the slightest appearance of proselytizing. Just as in all of our courses that contain meditation labs, we study contemplative practices, we study the cognitive frameworks in which they are embedded, but we never insist upon the verticality of those cognitive frameworks.
JCS: Yeah, that’s cool.
HR: So among these three “virtual mentors” we’ve got one who teaches an overlooked and underrepresented Theravada tradition called Shamatha (concentrative meditation) from Thailand. Dr. Sarah Shaw of Oxford University has written quite a number of books on the Buddhist meditation; but to me, the most helpful to my students and to my teaching is the one of that title in which she has gathered, translated, and critically introduced every single passage on meditation in the entire Pāli Canon. It’s just text and context right there for students. We have also had as a mentor a Japanese Rinzai Zen abbot, Masaki Matsubara. He has a PhD in Japanese religions from Cornell. Our final mentor is a qigong and Taiji master who also has a PhD from Brown in classical Chinese Philosophy, Dr. Larson DiFiori. These hourlong meditation sessions are open not only to our students—we’ve made it open to students from any campus anywhere. I hope you readers will take advantage—I’m making this offer to your readers that we have this Virtual Contemplative Mentors in Residence Program that they can take advantage of on an individual basis, or you can have a class involved, as long as we know in advance and you sign up.
JCS: All of your textual, historical studies as well as your pedagogy work and your development of Contemplative Studies as a field is really incredible. What’s exciting for you for Contemplative Studies? What’s coming up for you in Contemplative Studies? Alongside of that, what are some of the authors or books or resources that you’ve been sharing that are really exciting for you, that would be great for our readers to know about?
HR: Yes, that’s a great question. So in terms of books or resources, even though they didn’t set out to create a field of Contemplative Studies, these authors are foundational to the field, and in the Introduction to Contemplative Studies course we read them. So the first book we read is Alan Wallace’s book: The Taboo of Subjectivity. This is his history of how the subjective perspectives have been written out of science and out of higher education in general. But he begins by demonstrating that they were there, in protosciences and in the kind of religious traditions that dominated European universities, starting in the 13th or 14th century. But then, they were slowly removed over a number of centuries as part of the removing of a spiritual orientation to scientific research so that by the beginning of the 20th century subjective experience became forbidden in scientific research. In this book, Wallace makes an impassioned argument for bringing them back in via Buddhist meditative practices. For me, this argument about subjectivity and the importance of subjectivity in a university education, in scientific research, and humanistic research and contemplation is absolutely foundational to the field of Contemplative Studies.
Doing these first-person practices at the same time we are studying texts written about them gives a significant additional insight into the meaning of these texts.
It is particularly crucial for the study of human consciousness, which is still to this day dominated by exclusively third-person methods that actually remove subjectivity from the study of consciousness. Consciousness is something that each of us has. You can’t study what’s going on within the consciousness of people without recognizing that it’s consciousness studying consciousness. It’s important to figure out a way to bring in subjective perspectives without allowing them to bias the work. That can often be the issue where the subjective hidden or unhidden agendas bias the way that the research is constructed or the way the data is analyzed, and you can see it in the sciences. Not only is it important to gather data from the subjective experience of subjects in scientific experiments on consciousness, but also it’s important that the research is conducted by people who also have their own contemplative practice. Such a practice can help the scientist create better experimental designs that are more informed because of the same or similar contemplative practice is being done by that scientist, and it can help give insights into the nature of potential subjective biases in creating, conducting, and analyzing experiments on consciousness. But here we once again introduce that issue I previously called “the elephant in the room.” It is only through careful demonstration time after time that the superiority of having a scientist who is experienced in a contemplative practice that gives them insight into the effects of the same or similar contemplative practices on the nature of consciousness can be demonstrated to a doubting scientific world that has inherited what Wallace calls the “taboo of subjectivity.”
The other book is The Embodied Mind, which Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rush wrote. It was published in 1991, and it argued, against the prevailing beliefs in cognitive science, that the brain works like a computer. We have this tendency to think that everything’s happening in the brain, and the brain is disconnected from the body. These three authors forcefully argued that, no, in fact, the brain is an integral part of the body, and that the mind and body together—in other words, “the embodied mind”—interacts in a profound and fundamentally fluid way with the various environments in which an individual finds herself. So that as each and every one of us relates to other things in the world, we cocreate with those things and people our worlds of experience from moment to moment. So social relations are also important, and they have important influences. It’s a little difficult to read, particularly the chapter on visual cognition, but that’s a good example of how human experience is a cocreation of an embodied individual and the environment in which she finds herself, including, of course, other people. If you get through that chapter, and just stand back and look at it from even a humanistic standpoint, you see that the world of our experience is constructed as we experience it.
In addition to The Taboo Subjectivity and The Embodied Mind, I often have students read, for the neuroscience perspectives, one of the James Austin books. His first book, Zen and the Brain, is 900 pages, so I only used that once. I made the mistake of teaching it back to back with Narada Mahathera’s translation of A Manual of Abhidhamma. Even in the five weeks I set aside for this it was way too ambitious, as the course evaluations made abundantly clear. I never did that again.
JCS: Yeah, that’s a tough semester right there!
HR: I now use one of Austin’s shorter books, Meditating Selflessly: Practical Neural Zen. It’s only about 180 pages, and it really condenses his work. Austin is a neurologist who does a good job in synthesizing relevant neuroscientific research. He’s also a long-term Zen practitioner who is almost 100 years old and still practicing. He lives in Missouri and practices with the Zen Center that’s affiliated with the Rinzai tradition in which I trained. He’s just a wonderful, quirky guy. So in my Introduction to Contemplative Studies course I use these three books, and then I also include one of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s books or articles on the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) tradition. This is an important clinical scientific application of traditional Asian contemplative practices and has to be included in any course on the foundations of the field of Contemplative Studies.
Students write to me and say things like, “the only thing I remember from my entire four years at Brown is that meditation practice you taught.”
In terms of where we go from here, I hope that our work here in Contemplative Studies both at Brown and now in the International Society for Contemplative Research that we have established over the past three years and the new contemplative education network we are starting to develop are contributing to the creation and expansion of the new academic field of Contemplative Studies. It’s a tall order to create a completely new academic field and have it established both nationally and internationally, but that is what I hope we are in the midst of creating. But it is slow and you have to be willing to play the long game. That’s what we have done for over a quarter of a century now at Brown, and we are still not yet fully established here, though many other programs have used us as a kind of prototype. Just to see the benefits we’ve given to students is what makes all the work worthwhile. Over the past quarter century, I’ve probably now taught pretty close to 2,000 students in Medlab courses, and my colleagues here have probably taught another 2,000. I see it in their faces. I see it in how they develop over the course of a semester. And that’s really rewarding because they’re the future: they’re the people who are going to be building a new world and dealing with all its challenges. And if they have the contemplative practices to help them with that, then it’s going to be a better world, and consciousness will continue to evolve. I think I’ll leave it there.
JCS: Yeah. That’s a beautiful place to end. Thank you so much for such a rich conversation and for all of your work in Contemplative Studies and contemplative pedagogy, moving the field forward. This has been really a pleasure.
HR: And for me, too, Adam. Thank you for your questions.
JCS: It was all my pleasure.