What is Contemplation?: An Interview With John Dunne

Conducted by Adam Liddle, Associate Editor for the Journal of Contemplative Studies.

JCS: Thanks for joining us, John. In your perspective, what is contemplation?

JD: Well, I think that we’re not going to come up with a definition. Or more specifically, we’re not going to come up with a classic definition that’s meant to pick out the specific, essential characteristics of what constitutes contemplation, where every instance of contemplation has all those characteristics. Instead, what might work is what’s called a family resemblance or a thetic account of contemplation. For example, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used in Psychology, there’s a list of symptoms to diagnose depression, and to be diagnosed, someone has to satisfy a certain number out of that list. So, I think that’s at least better than a definition that’s trying to pick out essential characteristics.

What might be even better is an operational approach. This is what John Kabat-Zinn did when he gave his famous, operational definition of mindfulness: paying attention in a particular way—on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally. In an operational definition you don’t define something by enumerating its essential characteristics. Instead, you’re giving a kind of formula that constitutes the thing in question. For example, the operational definition of a peanut butter sandwich is: take two slices of bread, put peanut butter on one, and put the other on top.

In the context of Contemplative Studies, one challenge to formulating an operational definition is the need to narrow the scope of what we mean by “contemplation” for both practical and theoretical reasons. In practical terms, if we come up with a definition that allows nearly any human activity to be “contemplative,” then it will be hard to establish a coherent scholarly field. If golf can be as much a contemplative practice as Christian prayer, then the only unity to the field comes from vague abstractions, such as the notion that the contemplative is constituted by some special attitude or state of being, like contact with the “sacred.”

Likewise, for theoretical reasons, we need to resist the modern Western tendency to see “spirituality” as somehow highly personal and internal and not embedded in communities. Some modern styles of spirituality involve what Claude Lévi-Strauss called “bricolage,” where one assembles a highly individualistic practice by taking this and that from various traditions that one happens to encounter. I am not saying that this type of spirituality is necessarily inauthentic, but it does not fit my operational definition of a contemplative practice.

Here’s my operational definition: a contemplative practice is a cultural practice embedded in an environment, transmitted across multiple generations, and framed by an axiology with instructions or models directed to our body and mind for the transformations of persons, environments, and communities; these practices are accomplished for a purpose and accompanied by accessible signs of correct or incorrect practice assessed within a community of practitioners.

The idea of cultural practice comes from Edwin Hutchins and his work on Cognitive Ecology. I think it’s very important to think of contemplative practices as cultural practices that are transmitted and that we acquire and learn through cultural processes. And of course, because it’s a cultural practice, it’s always occurring within a particular time and place, which is an environment. My definition also mentions the importance of multi-generational transmission. This is key precisely because cultural processes are always multi-generational. Here, axiology plays an important role, because the values—aesthetics, ethics, and all that—are not just personal. The axiology gives a contemplative community the cohesion it needs, and it also points to the higher purpose that drives the practice. Likewise, that axiology itself involves a multi-generational process of transmission. And of course, for the practice to be learned and acquired, there must be instructions, or if there are no explicit instructions, there must be some process of learning it by interacting with others who model it. In other words, there must be some way of conveying what is to be done with your body and mind. And within the practice’s axiological framework, there are basic reasons to do the practice: you’re trying to change something, or you’re trying to make something happen. And that “something” that the practice brings about might be within an individual, it might be in the environment, or it might be in the community—or it might be in all three.

A contemplative practice is a cultural practice embedded in an environment, transmitted across multiple generations, and framed by an axiology with instructions or models directed to our body and mind for the transformations of persons, environments, and communities…

Since the practice is about making “something” important or valuable happen, it needs to be assessed, and any such assessment is public. That assessment is not made just by the individual practitioner but rather by the community of practitioners, which itself is multigenerational. In actual practice, you might sit in front of a single teacher or elder, and they give you guidance. They’d say “well, you should do it this way” or “not that way.” Or maybe they don’t say it explicitly, they just model it for you without necessarily pointing it out explicitly. But even if it’s a single teacher or elder who does the assessment, they’re doing that in the context of a community that supports them and that taught them the practice in the first place. So even in that case, assessment has to do with community.

As an aside, I’ll note that there’s an implicit critique here. Let’s say someone invents something and they set themselves up as a teacher, but there’s no community except their own disciples. They don’t have any peers or elders who can regulate that process of assessment. 

Maybe my definition is too traditionalist in some ways, but I’m claiming that those types of situations are not great for Contemplative Studies to practice, mostly because what we end up studying is something extremely idiosyncratic. And if somebody came up with something—and there are plenty of examples of this in our contemporary world—maybe they do some kind of bricolage, they put a few things together, people like what they do, they become kind of famous, they get a large following. But what they’re doing has only survived one generation and it’s extremely idiosyncratic. So, it’s not clear that it’s worth the effort to study that as a contemplative practice. Studying it as a cultural phenomenon might make sense, but if we’re really interested in how practices themselves are functioning, studying that idiosyncratic stuff probably is not worth it. It’s just not worth the resources. Let it take another generation or two before we study that. That’s my spiel.

…these practices are accomplished for a purpose and accompanied by accessible signs of correct or incorrect practice assessed within a community of practitioners.

JCS: I love it. That’s so wonderful. Thanks so much, John. You have all of this great knowledge and analysis of what contemplative practice is, can you talk a little about how contemplative practices show up in relation to your own research?

JD: I do research with scientists, and within the Humanities, I do mostly Buddhist Studies research, as well as sometimes doing Cultural History or critical Religious Studies. I’m really interested in the ways that practices transform people. And I think when you’re reading certain kinds of texts it’s very important to keep in mind, if it’s a text in an explicitly contemplative tradition, how this would be part of that process—how the text would be part of that process of transformation. So, for example, I just finished a translation of the Ratnāvalī (Nāgārjuna’s Precious Garland) with a lengthy introduction cowritten with Sara McClintock. The way we’re thinking about that text is very much as a contemplative text. We don’t necessarily use that word, but our way of interpreting the text always comes back to the question of what would it mean to try to embody what this text is saying in a daily practice or in the practice of life, so to speak? 

I also have a student, Jeremy Manheim, who just finished a really great dissertation on a critique of Buddhist naturalism, meaning scientized Buddhism, using a lot of Madhyamaka philosophy among other things. In working with Jeremy, the way we read the Madhyamaka texts is always assuming that somewhere in them there’s a connection to the practices that people are doing. And without over-reading the text that way, we try to be attentive to how it’s connected to the ecology that’s formed by its contemplative tradition. So that’s one way that contemplative practices show up in my work, and I mention that example because, in Buddhist Studies, people can completely forget that this is a contemplative tradition.

In my more cognitive scientific work, the way contemplation shows up is very specifically about the mechanisms of how the practices work. Asking questions like, what is the mechanism of different styles of mindfulness? How does it change people? Is it effective in changing people? What are the variations between different types of practices? How do variations of practice that aren’t just mindfulness show up? And what do we learn from examining the effects of variations in the model of the practice?

Another really important thing for me is the difference between what a tradition says about practices and what they do. So many times, you’ll find people read a text like the Bhāvanākrama of Kamalaśīla, the Stages of Meditation, and they’ll read it as a description of practice. But it’s not a description, it’s a prescription. The reason Kamalaśīla had to write it is that the Tibetans weren’t doing what he thought was best. And those kinds of texts can become very idealized, so that people in the tradition say they follow some meditation manual, but when you actually engage with the tradition, you see that they don’t actually follow some details of the manual.

The lesson here is that, if like me you’re interested in the mechanisms that underlie practices, it’s important to engage with these kinds of texts and oral accounts to try to understand what people are theorizing about the practices and what kinds of instructions they give. But you have to be very cautious, because what people say or what people write is not necessarily what people do. And sometimes theories are more about responding to critics than they are about actually trying to account for how our practice works. So, the way contemplation shows up in this context is just that I take contemplation as something concrete that people actually do. It’s not an abstraction. A contemplative practice is an actual human act. That’s my touchstone.

JCS: That’s great. Let’s move on to the third question then. In terms of the future of Contemplative Studies, either for your own work or what you’re seeing happening in the field, what’s really exciting to you right now?

JD: I haven’t read it all, but David McMahan’s new book, Rethinking Meditation, is the kind of thing that’s exciting to me. We’re really getting more sophisticated, we’re not just doing the kind of “gotcha version” of cultural history or cultural criticism where contemplation or mindfulness or whatever is reduced to a cultural aberration, so to speak. I think David’s approach is to take the practices, in some sense, seriously but also to have a very finely grained way of interpreting how they’ve changed, what is happening in new contexts, and how we understand them as they are transformed. So, taking these practices seriously just means admitting that something’s happening here; this is not just epiphenomenal to culture or whatever. But, at the same time, things like the cultural ecology, the process of transmission, the conceptual frameworks in which those practices are being received, the history of the modern West—all those kinds of things are really relevant. I think that’s exciting because that allows us to start to get a better sense of how the practices are embedded and therefore how they’re working.

Some of the work I’m really excited about is scientific work. My friend and colleague, Antoine Lutz, is doing some great work on the phenomenology of practices and trying to understand how those practices are affecting experience. A lot of his work has also been trying to develop models that help us to understand how practices manifest in the mind-body. What I think is very promising is the attention to the mechanisms and processes that are examined as being culturally embedded. I think there’s some really great work going on there. There are advances in understanding things like decentering that I think are very important in understanding the role that conceptual frameworks play in practices that scientists are engaging with right now.

JCS: It feels like the focus on cultural framework is a really fertile spot for transdisciplinary research, where the humanities can have a lot to say in scientific research.

JD: Right, yes. Part of my role when I work with scientists is to give them not just the traditional Buddhist cultural framework for some practices but also to think through how this practice would be received in, let’s say, an American cultural framework or, especially, a WEIRD—that is, Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic—framework. And how is this practice going to be reread, so to speak? That’s part of what David’s talking about in his book: how is this going to be reread and interpreted by an upper middle-class, white American with some slight psychological issues? Not to be so disparaging, but asking how this is going to be read by those people is essential.

JCS: That’s great. I love that. Let’s finish up with our last question here. You’ve already mentioned a couple of studies and authors, but what are some other of your favorite books in Contemplative Studies that our audience might be interested in?

A contemplative practice is an actual human act. That’s my touchstone.

JD: I’ll put in a plug for a book that I think is not really about Contemplative Studies, but I think it’s something everyone doing Contemplative Studies should read—which is The Blind Spot by Evan Thompson, Adam Frank, and Marcelo Gleiser, just out from MIT press.

JCS: Oh yeah. Tell me about it.

JD: One of the things that I think Contemplative Studies often falls into is a bifurcation between the first-person and the third-person. There can be this partisan exaltation of the first-person that is somehow impenetrable or unquestionable—irrefragable is one term here in Philosophy: the unquestioned truth of first-person experience. That’s an extremely problematic idea, but it’s the doppelgänger of the exaltation of the third-person and of third-person knowledge—allegedly “objective” knowledge—where the first-person has been erased. And The Blind Spot is especially critiquing this naive objectivism that has become so dominant in our culture but also how that naive objectivism fuels naive subjectivism.

One starting point of the objectivist position is the bifurcation of reality, where there’s material stuff and mind stuff. But then as the objectivist project proceeds in the modern period, it begins to explain more and more aspects of subjectivity in objectivist terms, and our cultural account of subjectivity starts to seem like it’s a well-fortified island floating on a sea of dead matter, to quote Nishitani. Eventually, the last vestiges of subjectivity are reduced to objective entities or processes, such as brain activity, and the fortified island of subjectivity crumbles. We become dead matter too. We’re just flesh robots.

So, in response to that, as a sort of equal and opposite reaction, we might say, “No I am not a robot, I transcend everything that science could ever say. I have an absolute unquestionable first-person perspective that actually trumps all those things that the scientists say.” It’s that position, which you find sometimes in Contemplative Studies, that is the result of the history of objectivism. So, The Blind Spot is really kind of cutting through all that.

JCS: This has all been so wonderful, thanks so much for joining us today, John.