Articles

After a century and a half of focus on Buddhist doctrine, academic attention is increasingly being paid to practice. What remains undertheorized, however, is the relation between the two. An example of this is the idea that tantric practice is simply a ritual technology, separate and autonomous from doctrinal formulation. This is a persisting academic trope, one that conceptualizes doctrine and practice dichotomously.

The religious or spiritual value of contemplative practices and the use of psychedelics is not intrinsic to experiences obtained through them and is instead relational—a function of how they alter consciousness. In support of that claim, I first present a nonreductive, nondualist Buddhist account of consciousness that calls critically into question the merits of both physicalist and phenomenalist reductionism in exploring the meditative and psychedelic alterations of consciousness.

“Re-Visioning Ethnography Through Meditative Practice: The Proposal for a Contemplative Anthropology and Its Experience through Visual Elicitation Technique” by Federico Divino, Visual and Digital Cultures research center at the University of Antwerp Abstract: This article introduces a novel method presently in development that integrates ethnography and visual elicitation techniques to explore meditative experiences and investigate…