CONFERENCE BROCHURE - Mind & Life Institute

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Mind and Life Summer Research InstituteJune 16 – June 22, 2012Anne Carolyn Klein / Rigzin Drolma Ph.D., is Professor of Religious Studies at Rice Universityand a founding director and resident teacher of Dawn Mountain, a center for contemplative study andpractice in Houston (www.dawnmountain.org). She lectures and leads retreats widely on contemplativepractice as well as on the Buddhist texts and theories of knowing that support these.She writes and practices primarily in the Tibetan tradition, translating both classic texts and oral commentaryon them. All her scholarly work inquires into the different functions of the human mind, especiallythe capacity for intellectual as well as direct knowing. Her books include Knowledge andLiberation, on Buddhist distinctions between cognitive and sensory knowing; Path to the Middle: TheSpoken Scholarship of Khensur Yeshe Thupten, on preparing to meet the ultimate; Meeting the GreatBliss Queen, contrasting Buddhist and feminist understandings of self as mere construction or subtleessence; and, with Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinopche, Unbounded Wholeness, which translates and discussesa Dzogchen text from the Bön Buddhist tradition. Is the intellect a help or hindrance in cultivatingnon-conceptual realization? This is a central debate throughout Buddhist history — Anne’sbooks all explore some aspect of this question.Her most recent book is Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse: A Story of Transmission, Anne’s chantableEnglish translation of foundational practices from the Longchen Nyingthig, with CD of the English andTibetan chanting. She is currently translating and introducing select works by Jigme Lingpa for a bookon him and completing a translation of Strand of Jewels, a collection of Dzogchen teachings by KhetsunRinpoche himself. She is also in the daunting mid-stages of her own manuscript, The KnowingBody which explores the epistemology of the body’s innate intelligence.Sara L. McClintock, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Religion at Emory University where she teachesundergraduate and graduate courses in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism and interpretation theory in thestudy of religion. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Bryn Mawr College, her master’sdegree in world religions from Harvard Divinity School, and her doctorate in religion from HarvardUniversity. She has spent time as a researcher at the Central Institute for Higher Tibetan Studiesin Sarnath, India, and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and has taught at the University ofWisconsin-Madison and Carleton College. Her interests include both narrative and philosophical Buddhisttraditions, with particular focus on issues of rationality, persuasion, reading, temporality, embodiment,and ethical formation. Her work includes a variety of published articles and a book,Omniscience and the Rhetoric of Reason: Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśīla on Rationality, Argumentation,and Religious Authority. She has also co-edited a volume of articles on Indian and Tibetan Madhyamakawith Georges Dreyfus, The Svātantrika-Prāsaṅgika Distinction: What Difference Does a DifferenceMake? Her current research centers on aesthetic response in Buddhist narrative literature andits role as a catalyst for ethical self-fashioning and transformation.Matthieu Ricard, Ph.D., is a Buddhist monk at Shechen Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Born inFrance in 1946, he received a Ph.D. in Cellular Genetics at the institute Pasteur under Nobel LaureateFrancois Jacob. As a hobby, he wrote Animal Migrations (Hill and Wang, 1969). He first traveled tothe Himalayas in 1967 and has lived there since 1972, studying with Kangyur Rinpoche and DilgoKhyentse Rinpoche, two of the most eminent Tibetan teachers of our times. Since 1989, he has servedas French interpreter for His Holiness the Dalai Lama.He is the author of The Monk and the Philosopher (with his father, the French thinker Jean-FrancoisRevel), of The Quantum and the Lotus (with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan), and of Happiness,A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill and Why Meditate? He has translated several booksfrom Tibetan into English and French, including The Life of Shabkar and The Heart of Compassion.As a photographer, he has published several albums, including The Spirit of Tibet, Buddhist Himalayas,Tibet, Motionless Journey and Bhutan (www.matthieuricard.org). He devotes all the of proceeds fromhis books and much of his time to over one hundred humanitarian projects (schools, clinics, orphanages,elderly people’s home, bridges) in Tibet, Nepal and India, through his charitable associationKarunashechen (www.karuna-shechen.org) and to the preservation of the Tibetan cultural heritage(www.shechen.org). He is also a member of the Mind and Life Program and Research Council.24
Mind and Life Summer Research InstituteJune 16 – June 22, 2012Sharon Salzberg has been a student of meditation since 1971 and has led meditation retreats worldwidesince 1974. She teaches both intensive awareness practice (Vipassana or insight meditation) andthe profound cultivation of lovingkindness and compassion (the Brahma Viharas).Sharon’s latest book is the New York Times Best Seller, Real Happiness: The Power of Meditation: A28-Day Program, published by Workman Publishing. She is also the author of The Kindness Handbookand The Force of Kindness, both published by Sounds True; Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience,published by Riverhead Books; Loving Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness and AHeart as Wide as the World, both published by Shambhala Publications; and co-author with JosephGoldstein of Insight Meditation, a Step-by-Step Course on How to Meditate (audio), from SoundsTrue. She has edited Voices of Insight, an anthology of writings by Vipassana teachers in the West, alsopublished by Shambhala.Sharon Salzberg is cofounder of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in Barre, Massachusetts. She hasplayed a crucial role in bringing Asian meditation practices to the West. The ancient Buddhist practicesof Vipassana (mindfulness) and metta (lovingkindness) are the foundations of her work. “Each of ushas a genuine capacity for love, forgiveness, wisdom and compassion. Meditation awakens these qualitiesso that we can discover for ourselves the unique happiness that is our birthright.” For more informationabout Sharon, please visit: www.SharonSalzberg.com.Michael L. Spezio, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience at Scripps Collegeand Visiting Faculty in Affective and Social Neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology. Hisresearch seeks to understand how the brain contributes to empathic, moral, and political cognition andaction, with a focus that includes the influence of contemplative practices on these processes in themind. He is Research Director of the Center for Engaged Compassion at the Claremont School of Theology,and a Senior Fellow with the Mind and Life Institute. He is also an ordained minister in the PresbyterianChurch (U.S.A.), and works to facilitate the positive engagement of religious and scientificperspectives. He is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Religion & Science (2011), and of theforthcoming Religion & the Science of Moral Action: Virtue Ethics, Exemplarity, and Cognitive Neuroscience.www.scrippscollege.edu/academics/faculty/michael-spezio.phpContemplative exercise at the 2010 MLSRI.25
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CONFERENCE BROCHURE - Mind & Life Institute

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