Journal of Contemplative Studies
July 23, 2025
Roman Palitsky, David J. Cooper, Jared R. Lindahl et al.
10 citations
Western Buddhist meditators often draw on both religious and scientific worldviews to make sense of meditation-related challenges. Interviews with 68 meditators and 33 meditation experts revealed five ways these worldviews relate: conflict, compatibility, nested relationships, discrete domains, and complementarity. These varied relationships carry existential weight and influence how meditators respond to challenges. The findings suggest that the scientific study of contemplative practices should consider the diverse ways religion and science interact, and that nuanced understandings of these relationships can help practitioners and teachers address meditation-related difficulties.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
August 6, 2024
Federico Divino
2 citations
A new method combining ethnography and visual elicitation uses mandala-like images to capture how consciousness evolves during meditation. Adapted from Jungian psychology for qualitative fieldwork, the approach centers on participants' direct meditative experiences, iterative multistage mandala drawing, and a deliberate break from conventional artistic norms. A case study illustrates the visual data obtained from meditation sessions, revealing the transformative character of contemplative practice. The method marks a shift in ethnographic focus toward meditation and examines the dissolution of subjective boundaries inherent in such contexts.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
July 23, 2025
Potprecha Cholvijarn
1 citation
An analysis of a meditation manual titled "Baep Doen That" (Model for walking the elements) attributed to Supreme Patriarch Suk Kai Thuean (1733–1822) of Bangkok, Thailand, describes a practice for advanced meditators. The manual consists of visualizations of the six elements (earth, water, wind, fire, space, and consciousness) plus mind (citta), represented by sacred Pāli syllables in eight verses. Each verse is taken from the Iti Pi So Eight Directions protective chant and is aimed at developing one of the eight supernormal knowledges and powers (vijjās). The analysis incorporates interviews with the current lineage holder of Suk's meditation.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
September 18, 2023
Bin Song
1 citation
Cheng Yi (1033–1107), a foundational thinker in the Cheng-Zhu Confucian lineage, developed a range of contemplative practices—including quiet-sitting meditation, beholding, calligraphy, and restful sleep—that incorporate sitting postures, breathing, and calming the mind. These practices arose during political and social crises amid diverse interpretations of Ruist classics and influences from Buddhism and Daoism. Cheng Yi's approach integrates the virtues of reverence and righteousness, focusing on the ontological and empirical dimensions of the human heartmind. His metaphysics emphasizes the nontemporality of pattern-principle's regulatory role, enhancing the pan-contemplative nature of the Ruist lifestyle. The work provides original translations and comprehensive scholarly analysis of these practices, offering comparative insights for contemporary contemplative studies and guidance for balancing intellectualism, contemplation, and ethical action.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
June 25, 2026
Daniel Hirshberg
A philosophy of psychedelics is now broadly relevant due to mainstream interest, scientific investigation, therapeutic trials, entrepreneurial enterprise, and decriminalization of natural psychedelics in several American states. Chris Letheby's Philosophy of Psychedelics is the first monograph to apply the term as an unelaborated title, backed by Oxford University Press, projecting the authority of an academic urtext that could define a renewed and newly legitimate field of inquiry.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
January 29, 2026
Iain Sinclair
The eighth-century Buddhist text Bodhicaryāvatāra, often used in modern meditation teachings, developed alongside restricted tantric practices. The author shows that Śāntideva’s visualization techniques parallel transgressive rituals from the Secret Communion (Guhyasamāja Tantra), and his homage to Mañjunātha, an esoteric deity, suggests tantric influences. Double entendres about bodhicitta may reference libertine yogis. While tantric yoga aims at deification, Śāntideva’s mandalic confession rite fosters humility and altruism, offering an indirect critique of transgressive bodily yogas. The article reconsiders the relationship between guided meditation and ritual action in this contemplative tradition.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
November 17, 2025
Ashok Zaman
Contrary to Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi's claim that mindfulness and Phenomenology are incomparable because mindfulness focuses on experience rather than the mind-world dyad, the author argues that both traditions aim at knowledge beyond mere words. Drawing on Eugene Gendlin's experiential Phenomenology, the author contends that mindfulness, rooted in its soteriological context, cultivates a form of higher cognition (prajñā) grounded in implicit experience. This provides precise epistemic footing for philosophy, showing that recovering contemplative practice advances rather than diverges from the phenomenological project.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
November 17, 2025
Devin Zuckerman
The Great Perfection text known as the Unimpeded Sound Tantra and a twelfth-century commentary describe divination practices that interpret signs in the outer elements—earth, water, fire, and wind—manifesting as omens in the sky. The purpose is to determine a community's collective karma, understood as their reservoirs of virtue and the consequent likelihood of positive or negative destinies. A narrative illustrates interdependence between human communities and more-than-human beings called lha (gods), engagements between humans and elemental ecologies, and relationships between contemplative practitioners and the communities for whom they perform divinations. The article explores how these materials invite reconsiderations of Buddhist contemplatives as world-abdicating renunciates, emphasizing contemplative life as immersed within overlapping social domains of human, non-human, and more-than-human beings.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
September 11, 2025
Michael L. Raposa
Practices of meditation and spiritual combat in martial arts enhance the capacity to control attention, which is morally significant because deliberate behavior—action performed with careful attention—is what makes ethical evaluation possible. Paying attention is itself a kind of doing that can be done well or poorly. Drawing on Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, William James, and Charles Peirce, this essay explores the relationship between martial spirituality and an ethics of attention, arguing that training attention is a foundation for ethical life and resistance to forces that capture it.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
July 23, 2025
Muhammad U. Faruque
The climate crisis is not merely a technical problem but a spiritual and existential crisis rooted in a flawed human self-understanding and a broken relationship with the natural world. The dominant mechanistic worldview treats nature as a resource for exploitation, leading to environmental degradation and alienation. Drawing on the Sufi philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, nature must be seen as sacred. In dialogue with Hartmut Rosa's concept of resonance, Sufi contemplative practices cultivate a deep ecological consciousness by treating everything in nature as alive and spiritually meaningful, advocating for an interconnected vision of life.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
July 23, 2025
Douglas E. Christie
The abyss, understood as a void, desert, or darkness, is essential to the work of love, as expressed by the medieval mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp and others in the apophatic tradition: love can only be known by relinquishing the narrow self and becoming lost in the depths. This idea has reemerged today as a grammar for engaging profound losses—social, political, environmental, spiritual, and personal—and for reimagining the value of what is being lost, rekindling love for what is precious, and recovering a sense of shared life with all sentient beings. It forms part of an emerging contemplative ecology of darkness, a radical spiritual practice for beholding ourselves and other living beings as part of a larger whole.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
July 23, 2025
Jared R. Lindahl
A philosophical analysis of Nan Shepherd's "The Living Mountain" argues that her intense attentional practices in the Cairngorms—walking, seeing, and cultivating absorption until she encounters the mountain as a unified living system—should not be described as Buddhist, despite possible influence from a Victorian-era summary of Buddhist teachings. The paper resists earlier scholarship that frames her experiences in Buddhist terms, and instead contends that such framing misrepresents her unique approach. It concludes by reflecting on how Shepherd's work can broaden scholarly definitions of contemplation to include practices outside major religious traditions.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
July 23, 2025
James Gentry
Buddhist amulets, often dismissed as popular piety, were integrated into elite Tibetan contemplative and philosophical practice. Thirteenth-century visionary Guru Chöwang's commentary on 'liberation-through-wearing' introduced analytic contemplation into amulet-tantra use. This shift, responding to criticisms of the Great Perfection, bridged the earlier Heart Essence of Vimalamitra and later Heart Essence of the Ḍākinī revelations. The later tantra-amulets harmonized analytic inquiry with embodied practice, blurring boundaries between discursive philosophy and tantric ritual. This challenges assumptions about amulets' marginal role and reshapes how Buddhist Tantra and philosophy are studied.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
July 23, 2025
Patricia M. Zimmerman
This essay argues that the climate crisis demands a lamentation rooted in the material reality of place rather than escapist romanticism. Drawing on Christian mystics Julian of Norwich, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and John of the Cross, alongside contemporary writers Robert Macfarlane and Annie Dillard, it proposes that their capacity to hold paradoxical truths in real bodies and time offers spiritual practices for confronting ecocide. These figures are presented as poets of apocatastasis, postulants of apophatic energy, and epistemologies of integration, moving beyond metaphor to engage the life-force of particular places.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
November 19, 2024
Richard Payne
Academic study of Buddhism has long prioritized doctrine over practice, but the relationship between them remains poorly understood. A common trope treats tantric practice as a separate ritual technology independent of doctrinal formulation, creating a false dichotomy. This essay argues that dichotomizing doctrine and practice is methodologically dysfunctional and proposes a dialectical relationship instead, illustrated by the Buddhist image of "the two wings of a bird." The argument is explored through examination of a Shingon homa ritual, showing how practice and doctrine are interdependent rather than autonomous.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
September 21, 2024
Ariel Evan Mayse
A review of Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo's 2023 book 'Neuroscience for Designing Green Spaces: Contemplative Landscapes' describes how urban green spaces can be intentionally designed to promote mental well-being by drawing on neuroscience. The book introduces the Contemplative Landscape Model, a framework that identifies seven features which enhance contemplative experiences in built environments. The reviewer, Mayse, explains why the book is a significant contribution to the field of Contemplative Studies and suggests areas for further work.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
February 29, 2024
Peter D. Hershock
The religious or spiritual value of contemplative practices and psychedelic use is not inherent in the experiences themselves but depends on how they transform consciousness. Drawing on a nonreductive, nondualist Buddhist account, the author argues that changes in subjective experience are only provisional goals; the ultimate aim is cultivating liberating and compassionate relations. Recent neuroscientific studies combining first-person and third-person methods challenge individualist conceptions of autonomy, highlight the importance of group practice, and show that mindfulness techniques stripped of their dharmic context are inadequate.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
February 29, 2024
Thomas Cattoi
Hesychasm, a monastic ascetic tradition rooted in the Desert Fathers and systematized by Gregory Palamas, describes mystical experiences that can be compared to altered states induced by psychedelic substances. The essay reviews hesychastic claims about ascetic practice and the methodological challenges psychedelic researchers face when assessing drug-induced experiences. Using Comparative Theology, it brings into dialogue the hesychastic understanding of deification through sacraments and the therapeutic impact of psychedelic experiences. While identifying points of contact, it foregrounds irreducible differences reflecting hesychastic anthropology and soteriology. The conclusion advocates for epistemic modesty against overhasty identification of mystical and psychedelic states, while inviting reciprocal openness between theologians and psychedelic researchers.
Journal of Contemplative Studies
July 23, 2025
Willis Jenkins
Contemplative ecology—finding spiritual meaning in multispecies relationships—faces two potential injustices: it may prioritize personal spiritual fulfillment over political action to prevent extinctions, and extending justice to nonhuman creatures might undermine efforts to secure equal protection for human dignity. This essay examines how contemplative ecology can contribute to multispecies justice by analyzing Pope Francis's redefinition of human dominion in contemplative terms to address climate and extinction crises. The essay notes that this theological shift accompanies elevations of Indigenous governance rights and rights for nature, though neither is fully or consistently endorsed. These ambiguities illuminate questions about the role of contemplative practice in social and political transformations needed to repair relations with ecological systems.