Conducted by Adam Liddle, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Contemplative Sciences Center and the Associate Editor for the Journal of Contemplative Studies.
JCS: Let’s dive into the big question of the series. In your view, what is contemplation?
JC: That’s a great question, especially because we’re seeing this rise of Contemplative Studies. Often people might not all be talking about the same thing or have the same idea of what they’re talking about with each other. So, it’s really a great question to think with. I think contemplation can mean a lot of different things to different people. Colloquially, contemplation can refer to the idea of thinking in general – to ponder, to reflect, and to do this in a space that’s been carved out for observing things attentively. It signals an intentionality, saying, I’m going to go contemplate on this issue, and then I’ll let you know my decision tomorrow.
It also has a longer history with, and even etymological links to, ideas about religious musings – this sense of thinking or feeling or sitting with some thought. This is tied, at least in terms of the history of the term, to Christian mysticism and other kinds of religious traditions, where contemplation can be thought of as trying to become aware of, or become present with, the divine. This is the past use of the word, and it’s still operative in some sense. Some even see it as an awareness of the light of God; to be in touch with or be present with something that’s beyond the human.
It’s not just in Christian thinking, though, that contemplation can be useful as an idea. It also gets used in Sanskrit notions of darshan, where one seeks to behold a deity, or even of dhyana, a meditation. Contemplation in this sense can be used in Buddhism too, where some people will talk about seeing a vision of the Buddha, particularly in Northern, or Mahayana, traditions. There is also meditation that’s a development of concentration in samadhi or awareness in vipassana or thinking on particular Buddhist truths like the wheel of dependent origination or dhyana in general in order to decrease ignorance.
So, when I was thinking about this question, of what is contemplation, I kept coming up with some contradictions in the term: in some sense, it can mean to think and reflect on something, but it can also mean to have a content-free mind. It can mean to focus on things that are beyond the mundane of immediate human experience, and at the same time, the mundane, the human senses and the body can become tools in which to seek beyond the mundane. The focus on the mundane can then become important.
And finally, contemplation often carries metaphors of sight: to see, to look, to have a vision, to reflect, or to see the divine (sometimes literally), to seek something, or to see something, or to look for something, and yet it’s interesting that somehow with contemplation people often practice it with their eyes closed. There’s something about this idea of using the immediate or the close experience to seek something beyond or past it. So, overall, I think we can think of contemplation as sustained attention aimed to look beyond the immediate human experience, and to try to gain insight from that practice.
JCS: That’s all so rich and beautiful. I love the expansive, holistic way you’re considering contemplation. You bring in the visual and a lot of cognitive aspects. I’m curious about other sensory aspects. I don’t know if you have any reflection on how the different senses interplay with each other.
JC: That’s a great question. There are a few ways I’ve thought about that in my own work. At least in some Buddhist traditions, there are certain ideas about mindfulness and about techniques of vipassana, or insight meditation, training where people will attend to or note changes on the skin, notice the breath, or notice certain bodily things that are happening. And when people talk about contemplating the impermanence of the body through the attention to these particular sensorial and actual physical phenomena, they imagine that they can create an altered, personal or even social space, because it changes the attention patterns that we’re having.
This can potentially cause people to slow down the scatteredness of their thinking or not be as distracted by things because their lens, their focus—not to use another vision metaphor—is a little bit more specific, narrow, or subtle. We could say that this is a tendency or ability or development of an ability to discern things that might otherwise be unnoticed. And that can have large scale implications.
JCS: That’s great. Thank you for that. I’m curious, in your own research, field work, and writing, how is contemplation relevant to you? How does it intersect with your research?
JC: Yeah, this is good to ask because, again, with its history with specific traditions, contemplation as a term can sometimes gloss over practices in a bunch of other traditions that might not have as much of a clear and easy connection to it, even though there’s so much that can be learned from thinking about things through a general lens of Contemplative Studies. For me, I work mainly in Thailand on Thai Buddhism, and I see contemplation as an English word with a particular religious history to it, which doesn’t really have an easy Thai language equivalent. It can mean ‘to think’ in English, and in Thailand people say kit, to think, it in that colloqual sense too. But like most Buddhist studies scholars, or most Theravada scholars at least, I tend to use it more as a gloss for meditation in a general sense.
I think there is an emphasis in Thai Buddhism to practice developing skills of mental discernment, and coming to see things in particular ways, and I think we can think of this as contemplation. And that is, for me, useful to think with when I’m working on my own scholarship. I’m really interested in how the work of meditation comes to affect how people understand their selves and society, whether it’s concentration or awareness or both in mindfulness or in other local ideas about the development of the mind in either formal or informal practice.
This has come up in work that I’ve recently written on about meditation and social activism. I wrote a piece recently called “The Sounds of Silence” for a special issue on affective reverberations for American Anthropologist, and I have one now out in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute on silent protest and meditative practices of Thai meditation. For them, I look at how the disciplinary practices of contemplation and meditation can work to reorient these social spaces and re-tune or re-attune, as it were, these interpersonal relationships and the implications that can have even for large scale political change. I’m really interested in looking at the interpersonal and social space, and how contemplation works its way into certain dimensions of the social fabrics of communities, rather than viewing it as a solitary practice that doesn’t affect anyone else.
I also use contemplation in my work on everyday practice in Living Buddhism, and in my work on mindfulness. As I mention in my book Remembering the Present, people in Thailand, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka engage in mental practices that are often rendered as mindfulness. I looked at how these practices are connected to shared but also different ideas about the mind and about mental health. compared with the therapeutic contexts in the US where mindfulness-based therapies are applied. This work and the articles that I’ve written from that on mindfulness and mindful contemplation traditions seeks to broaden the sometimes-narrow definition of mindfulness that gets picked up in globalized forms.
I’m looking at how people are attending or contemplating or thinking about the mind and developing mental capacities in ways that tie to different ideals and different senses of what it means to live a healthy life. So, there’s a couple of ways, but in general, I’m really interested in the idea of contemplation because it can allow us to see past the, I don’t want to say mundane, but the everyday. It can help us to look at how the everyday can get used to connect people to these bigger issues, and then how that connection can reposition one in the everyday spaces.
JCS: That’s really well put. And you’re getting me excited for all your work. I want to go over and find those articles and read them.
JC: Thank you.
JCS: As you situate yourself within the wider field of Contemplative Studies, what are you excited about in the field? Where is Contemplative Studies going that makes you curious, either for your own work or things that other people are doing?
JC: There’s so much to be excited about. The increase in Contemplative Studies in the academy and in popular culture is really great in general because it provides a space for us to think about some of these bigger issues and their implications on social and political practices across traditions and cultural contexts. And I’m excited about a few different aspects of Contemplative Studies in particular. One is about comparison. Often, religious traditions can get pigeonholed into their own disciplinary silos. Looking at contemplation as an interdisciplinary, or even pluralistic religious kind of practice can allow us to think about difference in a way that isn’t just collapsing it all into saying that it’s really the same underneath. But it’s also looking at some shared tools and looking at what those differences and similarities can do for us. So, that’s one really great direction that Contemplative Studies is taking.
Tied to this is a marked, increased attention to cultural context in scholarly institutes and organizations like the Mind and Life Institute. Ten or twenty years ago, there was more of a sense that Buddhist meditation was universally the same, and people would seek to practice the same everywhere and have the same effects. And in the last few years at the Mind and Life Institute and other organizations that are focused on contemplation, I see an increased attention to cultural context, and more broadly to how the work on the mind in contemplative practices are shaped from different cultural traditions and different cultural spaces. That’s tied to an increased interdisciplinarity.
And finally, there are a lot of really cool ways that Contemplative Studies is moving that speak to issues that are larger and more applied than just contemplation for its own sake. I’m thinking here about things like pedagogy, like thinking about education practices. I’m also interested in ideas about healing and mental health, and the ways that contemplative practices are increasingly getting brought into hospitals; psychiatric hospitals and other kinds of hospitals, that look at how to create mental and physical health through particular kinds of contemplative practices. That’s really exciting.
There’s more and more attention to how contemplation in a very broad sense connects the everyday to the metaphysical, cosmological, even cosmopolitical, and ontological assumptions that people make. It allows us to make use of those bigger, broader, beyond-the-everyday commitments that people have when we’re looking at the everyday practices that they’re participating in. So, that’s a really cool and interesting area that Contemplative Studies is moving.
JCS: That’s all amazing. Thank you so much for that wonderful reflection on the field, Julia. With that in mind, I’m curious about your favorite books in Contemplative Studies.
JC: There are so many, and I would hesitate to try to be comprehensive, but let’s see if a few come to mind. I do want to point out that the book series at the University of Virginia Press is really exciting at the Center for Contemplative Studies. The Journal of Contemplative Studies is super exciting. So, those are great places to look to when we’re thinking about some of these works. Some of my favorite books are not just in or about Buddhism but speak across different religious traditions, such as my colleague Tanya Luhrmann’s book, When God Talks Back, and Rebecca Lester’s book, Jesus in Our Wombs. Tanya Luhrmann’s book is really useful to think with, and Lester’s work is really nice because it looks at the phenomenological and bodily practices that’s tied to religious commitments. I’m also a big fan of Tom Csordas’ work on sensory practices and embodiment practices, which I think is really useful.
Within the kind of Buddhist studies that I’m more focused on in my own ethnographic and theoretical research, there are a few books that I keep going back to and keep thinking with. Some of them are really looking at the social effects of some of these practices, such as Meditation, Buddhism, and Science edited by David McMahan and Erik Braun. I am also a fan of Joanna Cook’s books, both Meditation in Modern Buddhism and her new book Making of a Mindful Nation. More great books are Brooke Schedneck’s Thailand’s International Meditation Centers and Encounters with Buddhist Monks; Justin McDaniel’s Gathering Leaves and Lifting Words, and The Lovelorn Ghost and the Magical Monk; Nancy Eberhardt wrote a really influential book called Imagining the Course of Life about a Shan Buddhist Community; Sid Brown’s book The Journey of One Buddhist Nun is great; and Arnika Fuhrmann’s excellent Ghostly Desires shows how queer subjectivities and the politics of media are related in Bangkok.
There are a lot of great books about the social creation and implications of contemplation. As an anthropologist, as an ethnographer, I find myself going back to these and a lot of other ones. For Buddhist studies in general, I think that Bhikkhu Analayo’s book, Satipatthana: The Direct Path to Realization is really good, and Buddhaghosa’s book, The Path of Purification, the Visuddhimagga, translated by Bhikkhu Nanamoli too; there are a lot of tools and techniques for certain meditative practices in that. I recently was in Sri Lanka and came across a journal, a private journal of Bhikkhu Nanamoli’s that’s called The Thinker’s Notebook that I’m a big fan of. It’s really, really good.
And then I guess for somebody who’s coming into Buddhist studies, I like Rahula’s What the Buddha Taught. It’s a nice short summary. So those are just a few of many great books that look at contemplation broadly conceived and broadly thought about in a general way, not necessarily in terms of any single or narrow definition.
JCS: What a great array of books, I’m going to be adding so many of these to my reading list. Thanks so much, Julia, for joining me today and talking about contemplation. It’s been so wonderful having you.
JC: Great. Thank you so much.