Eunyoung Hwang, Graduate Student, University of Chicago Divinity School
My presentation shows how a neuro-phenomenological analysis would give a methodological frame, which enriches our reading of Tiantai Zhi Yi’s idea of contemplation/cessation. Taking up a neuro-phenomenological model on meditation that focuses on meta-awareness of awareness as objectless awareness and links it to a phenomenological concept of reduction, I will show how the contemplation of Tiantai Zhi Yi entails a
self-inspective moment of bracketing ordinary experience and reconfigures it. When introspectively seeing any moment of experience, self-introspection, first of all, reveals not only the meta-awareness of its intentional awareness of object in light of emptiness but also the meta-awareness of this empty, indefinite openness in a very specific moment of intentional experience.
