Karl Schmid, Graduate Student, Emory University
In the 8th century, Kamalaśīla wrote The Process of Meditation, a triad of practice manuals that became the seminal meditation texts for Tibetan Buddhism. Here he argues that ethical development for Buddhists requires conceptual meditation, namely, vipaśyanā. My work, as displayed in my poster, centers around these texts, their description of vipaśyanā, and Kamalaśīla’s argument that nonconceptual meditation is limited in its capacity to make the practitioner more ethical. The left side of my poster describes the texts themselves, letting the viewer know the primary attributes of vipaśyanā, and what Kamalaśīla himself said about it. The right side is a contemporary take on vipaśyanā, beginning with a rational reconstruction of the process, based on Wilfred Sellars’s “two-ply” model of observation. Finally I discuss this work in relation to contemporary debates on ethics in secular forms of meditation, and in relation to advancing the study of meditation as a whole.
