David Germano - Ancient wisdom for modern (and future) flourishing
David Germano is an educator, scientist, and renown Tibetologist. But to let his life and work be merely a list would be an irreparable simplification, inappropriate as framing for this conversation, and a blindness to the genuine teachings of care and loving-kindness that can be found and felt from deep in his work.
Join the Flourishing Commons community of listening and living - receive the newsletter that enriches these Origins conversations
David is Professor of Tibetan Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia, where he teaches in the Department of Religious Studies. One of the most powerful messages I receive in reading David's work is that our world, our lives in it, are in their own way as rich and complex and confronted with challenges as those environments we read about in religious texts, those environments from which human beings conducted the most interesting experiments with learning and self-discovery and emerged our greatest wisdom traditions. With an engagement with religious studies that is both academic and engaged, David takes up the crucible of now to give rise to a higher conception of and enactment toward flourishing; to give rise to new wisdoms here in this young century.
David has lived and studied in various regions of Asia for over a decade. He remains a global leader of questions on promoting flourishing in institutions of higher education. He has for decades been working with students, facilitating groups, establishing centers -- altogether what I might call convening and cultivating collectives -- around and toward flourishing, drawing upon ancient wisdom traditions, science, and the humanities alike. Those commitments have led to his creation and direction of the Tibet Center as well as bringing together ancient texts and resources with modern technologies to improve accessibility and expand reach. He founded and directs SHANTI (Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts Network of Technological Initiatives) and the Tibetan and Himalayan Library (THL), the largest international initiative using digital technology to facilitate collaboration in Tibetan Studies across disciplines.
The great thinker of conflict transformation, John Paul Lederach, once said to me that 'to better understand requires sitting with the social tissue, the web of relationships.' Few have done more for nor more intentionally created those webs around the idea of flourishing than David, so to understand flourishing in our world, his voice and experience are essential.
He received his doctorate in Buddhist Studies from the University of Wisconsin in 1992 for the dissertation "Poetic Thought, the Intelligent Universe, and the Mystery of Self: The Tantric Synthesis of rDzogs Chen in Fourteenth Century Tibet."
David has been doing all of this work of cultivating flourishing and he has also experienced profound shift over that time. A shift that might be described as moving toward contemplation as a site and source and literacy of living well.
In 2012 he founded the Contemplative Sciences Center and currently directs the Generative Contemplation initiative, which brings together scholars, lineage holders, meditation teachers, and designers to explore the past and future of contemplation through an innovative blend of humanistic scholarship, scientific research, and creative design.
So this is a conversation about the roles these wisdom traditions play in our modern lives and the art and practice of bringing them skillfully into it. But it is also about the shifting nature of our world and the ways that skill of meeting wisdom to context, too, must change.